NYTimes reviews Mint.com

Where’s It All Going? Find Out Online

Excerpt:

I finally got serious about using a Web service to see if it could present the stark truth of my gluttony. I didn’t pay close attention to other spending categories, like clothing or travel. Nor did I use it to pull in my 401(k) or brokerage account statements. Realistically, there is only so much we can take on all at once. So I will add in the other items later, bit by bit, if this first experiment goes well.

I did not choose Mint because I knew it was the best site. Its competitors include Wesabe, another relatively new (and free) service, and the online version of Quicken, which costs a few dollars a month. All of them track spending, create budgets and such. But Mint’s site actually worked the first time I tried it, unlike the others.

So I began on Mint by entering just three user names and passwords for American Express, Capital One and Chase. That allowed the site to grab all of my transactions on the five credit cards I have with those companies and put them on a single list. I’ve linked some screen shots to the version of this column at nytimes.com/yourmoney to give a sense of what this looks like.

The next step is to sort each purchase into a spending category. This is the true promise of setting this up online, because the site can, theoretically at least, sort the transactions for you.

Mint makes a worthy effort at this, cross-referencing each merchant name from credit and debit card bills to the Yellow Pages, then guessing whether it is a nail salon or a gym. Mint gets a lot of them wrong at first, especially independent restaurants and shops. Correcting six months or so of transactions took me more than an hour, though Mint can remember corrections for merchants that reappear on your list of purchases.

Comment: Kathee and I use it. I tried Quicken online and I had problems connecting to wellsfargo.com. It is not quite as robust in terms of functionality as Quicken.com but it is very solid.