Mint: The easiest way for college students to manage their money

As I mentioned before, the only way to improve your spending habits is to figure out how much you’re spending. To track my expenses, I use a program like Quicken or Money, because most banks and credit cards allow you to automatically download transactions into these programs. The only problem is that these programs aren’t free. This is where Mint.com comes to the rescue!

Overview

If you’re interested in keeping track of your spending habits without having to pay for traditional finance software, then Mint is perfect for you. It allows you to track the activity of all of your checking, savings, and credit card accounts in one convenient location with a few added benefits.

Setting Up Mint

After completing the initial sign up to create your account, you are asked to enter the information for your various accounts. This is the same information you use to log in to your bank and credit card websites. If there’s one reason useful web applications like Mint will take a while to catch on, I think this is it — people still don’t trust computers. However, Mint assures that your information is as safe and secure as it is with a bank.

Upon successful authentication of your account info, Mint automatically imports the transactions, categorizes your income and expenditures, and then provides visual graphs and pie charts showing exactly how you’re spending your money. The entire process only takes a matter of minutes.

Spending Trends

Mint will graphically show you where your money is going by displaying a pie chart of your expenses divided into various categories. This allows you to quickly view your current spending trends and compare it to previous months.

One cool feature is the interactive pie chart. The pie chart displays general categories like “Food & Dining”, “Bills & Utilities”, and “Dining”. When you click on one of the slices, you are taken to a more detailed view of that category. For example, “Food and Dining” is broken down into “Groceries”, “Restaurants”, and “Fast Food”.

 

Transactions

While Mint tries to automatically categorize your transactions for you, it’s not perfect. You’ll most likely have to go back and fix some transactions to make the information completely accurate. You can do this on the Transactions page.

This page provides a convenient list of the transactions across all of your accounts. You can also search for specific transactions and view transactions within individual accounts. In addition to specifying a category for each transaction, Mint allows you to assign “Labels” to them as well. Labels are defined by you, and you can assign multiple labels to a transaction. This is similar to using labels in Gmail or tags in Flickr.

To get an accurate Spending Trends chart, you need to make sure your transactions are categorized properly. Mint makes this process easier by allowing you to assign rules that are applied to specific transaction names. For example, my cell phone bill was showing up as something weird, so I clicked on “Rename”. Then I typed in the correct name and checked a box to “always rename _____ as _____”. Setting up these rules will help Mint “learn” to categorize your common transactions correctly.

Ways to Save

Based on your current checking, savings, and credit card accounts, Mint will recommend ways that you can save money. For example, it may recommend a savings account with a higher interest rate or a credit card with a lower interest rate. While this may be helpful for some people, I haven’t found this feature very useful for me. In some cases, the offers aren’t accurate. Right now, it says that my high-yield savings account is at 0% APY (which isn’t true), and it recommends that I switch to one of their sponsors. I’m going to pass on this feature, but other people may find it useful.

It’s Always On

My favorite feature of Mint is that it’s always on. After the initial set up, Mint requires little effort to maintain. With Quicken, you still have manually run the program each time to update you information. With Mint, everything is completely automated. Mint automatically updates your accounts even when you’re not logged in. What does this mean to you? It saves you the time and hassle of doing it yourself, and it means that Mint can send you text message or email alerts to let you know about:

• Low balances in checking/savings accounts
• Credit card due dates
• High/unusual spending by category (i.e. Shopping, Dining, Gas)
• Bank/ATM fees and finance charges
• Large purchases
• Large deposits becoming available

You have full control over what alerts you receive and how your receive them in your profile settings.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Mint is great. Although it may not have as many features as a program like Quicken, it’s a great free way to track your finances. In addition, it’s really easy to set up, and it automatically keeps your finances up-to-date. If Mint had been available during my undergraduate years, I probably would have been able to avoid the two times I overdrew my checking account. This is a good thing — Mint the sort of program every college student should be using.

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