Good for more than just Mojitos...
About a month ago I was reading slate.com and ran across this article about mint.com. The article is really more about the success of "web 2.5" companies, but when I read it I was curious what features the website had to offer. Lisa and I did budgeting the old fashioned way, with an Excel spread sheet and online banking (irony intended for you old folks). After exploring the website, I decided to give it a try for a while and see if it could replace our normal budgeting process.
Mint is a start-up company that runs a website where you can manage your money and use their tools to set up a budget. One neat thing is that you can give Mint your login information for your online banking and online credit card sites (they use the same encryption that the banks use, so it is secure), and Mint will automatically connect to those sites and pull over information about recent transactions each time you log in. This makes it useful already because you can go to one website now to see any recent purchases, whether from your bank account or any credit cards you might have, all in one list. It then lets you set up budget categories, and it will try to assign each transaction you make to one of the categories. It often messes up, especially if you make custom categories, but it is very easy to look over recent purchases and assign them correctly. Also, individual categories can be set up to "roll over," so if we don't spend all of our clothing budget one month, the extra will be added to the next months budget (this makes Lisa very happy), and if you overspend there will be less for next month.
Also cool is that I have student loans administered by three different entities (actually that is not cool), and Mint can login to those web sites as well and keep track of how deeply I have signed my life away. Currently the service is free and I hope it stays that way, but so far it has been so useful I might even consider paying if that is what happens.
Now budgeting takes all of 3 minutes a week, and we can check to see how we are doing anytime we want. I have never used Quicken, and it might be better for those with more complicated finances, but Mint.com is a neat, free tool to check out.
In Med school news, I have tests coming up is less than a week. The new schedule keeps them coming at a rapid pace. Dermatology has been completely unappealing so far, and it has been neat to learn what rheumatologists actually do besides rheumatoid arthritis. GI has been somewhat interesting though more complicated.
I heard from faculty talking at the curriculum committee meeting yesterday that hospital volume is VERY high right now due to flu season. Regardless of what Glen Beck and Bill Maher may tell you, flu vaccines (including H1N1) are safe and effective! Get them if you can!
9 comments:
Thanks for the info on mint. I will check out their site. Good job on the budgeting. Dad
We've actually been using Mint for about a year now. It is really useful to see how much we're spending in various categories. The only thing I don't like is that a sizable portion of transactions are not auto-categorized, so it still takes some work. But it's still pretty useful.
One cool thing is that I can go through and tag all our Vegas transactions and have it compute how much the vacation cost us. Again, some work, but less work than doing it all manually.
-Bryan (too lazy to re-login)
Yeah the auto-categorization is not very good, but it takes maybe 5 minutes to look through a whole month's transactions and assign them correctly, which is a lot less work than we did before.
Also, I clicked on that article link, and it's clear that Daniel Gross has no idea what Web 2.0 means.
...although admittedly, if Farhad Majoo had written the article, he would have found some way to make an even more egregious error. You'd think that a pioneer of web-based journalism would have a better knowledge of tech than Ted "series of tubes" Stevens... but no.
We've been using Mint too. It took way too long to categorize and tag everything, and I don't like how frequently I have to go back and edit it. But, it's a handy and well-designed gauge, and I like having that information available.
We have our student loans AND mortgage in there, so I'm greeted by a notice of crushing debt every time I log in.
yeah, web 2.0 refers to websites where users have the ability to modify content or interact with other people socially. Therefore, google is NOT a web 2.0 site as he suggests in his article, it is just a search engine, and is really a 1.0 site that survived the bubble. It has nothing to do with piggybacking on infrastructure that web 1.0 companies "set up" except for the fact that 2.0 sites came about when people were more comfortable with the internet and began to use it for more things.
And yes, Farhad Majoo is no better. In fact, Slate is just not a place to go for tech news. I think David Pogue does a good job at the NYtimes of doing tech articles for the average person.
I use cliffbudget. Cliff tells me if I have enough money to buy the things we want or need. Sad, huh?
-Mom
P.S I think it's really cool that you keep track of your spending. It will benefit you in the long run.
As long as we're piling on: "Web 2.0" is not a style of web design either. Just because you have glossy buttons and bright colors does not mean you have a "web 2.0" site. I get this a lot.
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