Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investments.
Mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. Instead, it monitors users’ spending habits, producing coherent graphs that are designed to help people save their money (or at least know where it’s all going). Users can also elect to receive SMS and email alerts when bills are due or their balance drops below a certain level.
Mint has seen extremely quick growth since its launch at TechCrunch40, and is now
monitoring a total of $11 billion in assets, with 350,000 registered users, it says. CEO Aaron Patzer says that Mint will eventually be able to move money around, but that functionality won’t be coming until 2009. Until then, Patzer says that the addition of mortgage and loan tracking will let Mint users effectively monitor their entire financial portfolio. It’s too bad we’ll still have to rely on our banks’ websites to actually pay the bills.
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Can any1 please tell me why I should trust mint with my personal financial information
Because they are “the first free, easy and secure way to manage and save money online.”. That’s what they say.
Blog with news: tinyurl.com/liviux
does not convince me. Dont see why I should trust them.
I’ve been using Mint for a while now with no problems - they’re not a site you really need to worry about. You’ve probably given your credit card information to much shadier organizations than Mint.
Just more data for mint to lose when they’ll eventually get hacked
Keep in mind Mint being non-transaction has big security benefits: no one can ever drain your accounts.
Mint is also anonymous, so no names, addresses, SSNs, account numbers, or even credit card numbers are in our database. Honestly, a hacker would have more information with any e-commerce shop than Mint.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
keep in mind you have given all your credentials to all your logins so that mint (via yodlee) can screen scrape your accounts.
More information with any e-commerce site? are you kidding me? I don’t remember giving amazon the login info to my amex/chase/wells accounts.
Patzer showing up in 5…4…3..2…
Good call, but I was 20 minutes off the mark on this one
I do care that people have an accurate picture on Mint, and TechCrunch is one of the best forums for that…
I’m all for it. Mint is one of the most useful services I use.
I got a kick out of seeing you pop up on every message out there questioning Mint’s security. I did a lot of research and you were on every message dissing your security….convinced me to join and it’s been smooth sailing ever since!
I wish mint would work in Canada… hmm
I like the concept that Mint brings to the market, but like the previous poster said, ALL my financial info in one place…. we’ll, I need a more convincing warranty that it is not hack-able.
And something not hack-able….is non-existing.
Right now I have 2 different bank accounts, with 2 different logins. Someone finds my login info from Wells Fargo, I still have US bank available. Risk diversification.
With Mint…everything….is….in….one….place…
Gives me the heevee-jeebees
Unfortunately, I’ve been attempting to add my salliemae loans this past week to no avail. Sent a message to support but there hasn’t been a response, so not sure if their CS team is small and/or swamped or not.
I’ve also posted the issue to their support forums, again, no response, only from other frustrated users experiencing the same problems.
They’ve always had these types of connectivity problems, and I’m sure they will say it’s on the financial institution’s end, but it still doesn’t alleviate the frustration from using an otherwise great service, esp. since I can’t get a response from anyone to see if there is anything I/they can do to fix the problem.
Johan,
Sorry to hear Sallie Mae didn’t work for you, and being the largest student loan provider, it was one that we heavily tested. Send me an email at aaron@mint.com and I’ll follow up for you - to make sure the problem is not widespread.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com
I’ve joined mint upon launch and was interested in it at first. I have not been on there for 4 months. Im bearish on this site, seriously.
If I were you, I’d worry way more about your own bank than Mint. Mint was built with security in mind, while your bank (especially if it is local) probably just bought the cheapest online banking application on the market.
See the following:
http://thedailywtf.com/Article.....ctor-.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Article.....anced.aspx
Having said all that, Mint will need to add the ability for two factor authentication probably via a key fob.
again? are you kidding me? Banks are regulated, they must have better than username/password authentication, get audited, have compliance assessments, sas 70’s, etc.
mint? they have a verisign log on the page and a nice sounding security page.
You are right, banks are required to have better security than just username/password. That is why they give you those stupid questions when you logon (”what is your favorite restaurant?”). They are not two form authentication and they are very annoying.
I have personally had my credit card information hacked from Citi’s own databases (they immediately canceled my account without telling me). My wife’s personal information was stolen when a state employee left their laptop in their car overnight (you can guess the rest of the story). Point is, your information can be stolen from any place that has your information which is a TON of places (any where you applied for credit of any kind, any credit card, any bank account, student loans, auto loans, mortgage, investments, etc). There is no true safety (Mint included). There’s also really nothing to worry about either as statistics show that less than 1% of Americans are victims of true identity theft (read about it here: http://www.wired.com/politics/.....ntPage=all).
The only thing I personally see missing (aside from what’s mentioned in the article) is the ability to enter cash and cash transactions. I know this kinda goes against what mint was founded as a way to make monitoring your finances and budgeting as easy as possible but it’d be nice to be able to have a cash account that can be manually tracked for those who care for such a feature such as myself.
…..”monitoring a total of $11 billion in assets”…
Are you suggesting that Mint is now an investment advisor? If so, are they licensed. Should we contact the state of California for Blue Sky violations and then the NASD? Be very careful in your wording that is thin ice. Just like p2p lending you’ll be shut down.
I like Mint, but, don’t use it. And yes, I spent years in online financial services so have seen a thing or two with respect to securities marketing.
Assuming assets means positive cash and not debt…
$11B / 350,000 = $31,400 (average cash per user). Not bad. Pretty affluent demographic they’ve got there.
Mint is awesome. Go on the site, read all about the security and stuff before you use it. It’ll ease your nerves.
The new loan feature is what I have been waiting for. Unfortunately I went from a net worth of greater then 0 to a net worth well under 0. My car and house sunk me.
The trending data is AWESOME. I love to see where I have spent my money.
What we measure is what we strive for.
I haven’t been able to get my loans in either, but I’ve emailed Aaron’s email address above to see if I can’t get that resolved.
I was using Quicken for this stuff for about 6 months. It was cool, but not ha ha cool. Then I bought a new computer and nothing transferred over and my backups would not restore. Basically, all of my fine tuning on what category I wanted everything to be in and all of my several months worth of data were lost. I had to start over, or pay more money for an upgrade to get the backups to work on a new computer.
I figured, if I’m starting over anyway, I might as well give Mint a try. I am soooo happy that I did. Mint blows Quicken out of the water!!! It’s so much easier to use and has a much cooler interface. And it’s totally free! And I can access the data from any computer, not just my home computer where I had Quicken installed. Which for me is a total bonus.
Mint.com is a free service. What do you expect. They collect your bank accounts so they can steal your money one of these days. It’s not like you have control over your data once you stored it on their server. You are not allow to require them to delete your data from their server because hell, this is a free service. You have no expectation of it.
I wonder, given the huge amount of promotional work TechCrunch does for Mint, whether they will be culpable if/when this happens.
Well, I was using MInt for tracking my personal account info, and it was great until one day it stopped accurately reflecting my actual account balance on my savings and checking and I haven’t bothered to try to figure out why. Now I get a nice email once a week that says I have lots of money! It’s kind of cheerful, like a candy gram.
I’m an avid Mint fan. I’ve actually made it a habit to visit the site daily to get a good understanding of where my money moves to and from. It’s been the first tool to give me a full picture of my finances without having to sit down and reconcile everything manually. (And I never bothered to draw my own pie charts.)
It’s been a smooth ride as I’ve been using it for about 5 months or so. They keep expanding their features and improving the interface. The voice of the company from their forums, blogs and even Aaron’s appearance in these discussions has assured me of their credibility to handle my secure financial information. Personally, I trust them.
However, my mortgage lender, Provident Funding didn’t show up on their lender list and I was waiting for this feature. Hmm…
Oh wait. This caused me to go back to Mint and double-check for my lender. They ARE there after all. Maybe there was a glitch when I first tried it which happened to be the day they launched the service.
What happens if Mint gets hacked? I don’t see any statement explaining what will be Mint’s liability and what are theybringing to the table in case the system gets broken into, or a disgrunted employee decides to play God with all my logins.
Will they go the ” we will refund your money, pay your credit monitoring service for 5 years, and use crazy sharks with laser beams attached to their heads to go after the perpetrators” route?
Or will they just go the “ooops, my bad” route?
They need an iPhone app…
When this site was first listed on techcrunch, I signed up immediately. It seemed to have such potential. I have had an account since then, and periodically log in in the hope that it will be useful to me. However, the site seems listless. The reports don’t address my needs, and its not clear to me whose needs they do address.
For example, if you look at the SpendSpace report, it will let you compare your spending on food and dining to the average in, say, Toledo, but it won’t let you see a trend of your overall spending across all categories. Very frequently, it gives me reports with obscure information that I don’t need, but fails to give me simple information that I do need.
I find this site frustrating, the original concept had such promise. But I haven’t been able to get any value from it. I am pretty close to giving up on it.
Also, as an aside, in my view they aren’t making good business decisions. They recently added mortgage functionality. How frequently are people going to refi because Mint told them they can save money doing it? It seems like a very limited/finite revenue stream. Despite the fact that they have access to my daily spending patterns, they have yet to offer me a single coupon or deal that was remotely useful. I am surprised they haven’t broadened their offers. If you think about it as a media business, they are attracting a ’saver/frugal’ demographic, you’d think they would accept any adds/offers that would be useful/attractive to that broad demographic.
Mint’s service is absolutely cool, reliable and of great importance to me. I’m so glad it extended further and now involved on mortgage an support loan tracking.
Mint is fun…but it aint no Quicken..its simply a dashboard with some advisory capability….biggest problem with it is that the bulk of the data is coming from your bank/debit card….and my bank does a pretty good job of keeping track of stuff…why do i want to complicate my lieft with mint?
Well I like the concept, but I cannot get a good test run because Canadian Institutions are not yet supported.
I have to agree though that my banks are doing a god job of reporting my financials already.
I had an article on my blog about mint at http://www.techforlunch.com
So it’s in the UK when? Perhaps you could ask them and update the post or something so I know when I can finally be interested in this company as the services are fantastic. But if no UK, I no play.
Dave
What I have been waiting and waiting for is some kind of monthly income statement. Yeah, my expenses are tracked wonderfully, but there is no information on my income. I have no way of even tracking if I am making or losing money each month the way mint is set up now.
I use mint and it is the best financial app I have ever used. I am not worried about security; They do not import anything as far as I can tell, they aggregate on the fly. Also I have insurance that deals with theft and identity theft and so on… - Try it, you will love it!
I remember that more than 10 years ago, Yodlee experienced the same questions about security on the forum of banktech.
Meanwhile some countries like Belgium do not allow banks to grant online banking without OTP ( one time password , ie digipass is the most common ).
what if OTP becomes the rule fir any given country ?
I wonder if they track bad loans also?
FYI: I’m fairly certain that if you’re using MS Money, all of your account info (including user names and passwords) is stored on the msmoney.com servers. I’ve deduced this from error messages I’ve received when trying to update my accounts.
Can’t say enough about Mint. The security is no more an issue with mint than everywhere else. Yes it’s all in one place and yes blah blha blah but check out their security video and FAQs, if you’re still worried don’t use them! I’m more worried that my Pay-Pal account will be hacked where someone can actually MOVE MONEY AROUND…oh wait PAY PAL WAS ALREADY HACKED. Bottom line: It’s VERY convenient and the budgeting feature that spans all of my credit AND debit cards is a life-saver. I’m as cautious as they come with security but I’m not going to live my life in fear and pass over such a great FREE service for a what-if scenario.
p.s. The fact that the CEO is on this forum answering questions and giving out his email deserves BIG props. Just shows that mint actually listens to their users and cares about providing an ever-changing, more-and-more valuable product. As a designer I REALLY appreciate their great graphic design and UI too.
These comments are a bit old and I know the article was written a while ago, but Stephen asked for an iPhone app .. I just used the Mint iPhone app yesterday. They listen! Bravo Mint and bravo Aaron Patzer!