Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint’s data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer’s eyes.
Consumers are hurting, but if Mint’s data is indicative of the economy as a whole, it is not as bad as you might think.
(Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ).
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts.
As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents?
Fortunately, Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively. Since the crisis first hit in September, our user registration rate has more than quadrupled, giving us 900,000 sample points on the economy. That’s close to 1% of US households. All told, Mint.com tracks more than $50B in assets & liabilities.
For the past year, we’ve been using this data to help people set budgets using our SpendSpace feature. For example, do you spend more or less on coffee than the average San Franciscan? Or, how does your average purchase price and purchase frequency at Amazon.com, Starbucks, and JetBlue compare to other Mint users?
We’ve discovered this data – in aggregate and entirely anonymous of course – is tremendously valuable in serving as a consumer advocate: the WSJ used our empirical data on bank fees to identify the worst banking offenders. As of late, it also provides a tremendous insight into consumer spending trends, and that’s valuable for all of us.
Looking across spending as a whole in 2008, we can see a phase change beginning in the summer. After a bump in the May/June time frame from tax refunds and credits, we see spending declined by $400 / month / household. Spending eroded even further (a $200 drop) in November along with consumer confidence, bouncing back only slightly for the holidays.
Looking by category from January to November, we see greater than 20% declines in entertainment (-22%), Home – including furnishings, services, and home improvement (-21%), gas/fuel (-32%), and travel (-24%). Spending also declined in food, shopping, and bills/utilities, with the only increase being spending on financial advisors as people look for help during uncertain times.
Looking at average account balances is also interesting. From August to December, the average savings account was halved to $5,500. Fortunately, credit card debt remained roughly constant, but investments declined by 24%, while loans (mortgage, HELOC, student loans, and personal loans) increased by 11%.
Is it Great Depression bad? That’s a qualitative question I can’t answer. But what the data, the hard facts, mean for you – if you run a consumer business – is that your customers are spending $400 less each month than they were a year ago, have burned through half of their savings, and on average have taken on an additional $5k in debt.
Good decisions are based on good data. And data – in itself – may be one of the most valuable by-products of any startup.
I feel like the most ingenious solution to all of this would be to spend 3000 freshly tree-grown dollars for every man woman and child in the US on government-funded projects.
Ah, thank goodness. DC’s got my back. Cool. Relax, it’s covered.
Well probably not, but it is certainly better than corporate welfare that the U.S. financial services and auto industries are getting.
I love how free market exponents at these companies take the libertarian view when it benefits them, but quickly embrace welfare when it suits them even better.
As for mint, this is great data.
I am in India, so I am not familiar with US laws on these things, but if I was mint, I would offer all of the services for free, in return for being able to trade on anonymised aggregate data. When they see uptick in spending across certain categories, I would buy stock companies that can benefit from that.
Just looked at the site, it seems all the services are already free, but mint gets referral fees from vendors.
This seems to be one of the rare web 2.0 companies that is not only a terrific service but also has a business model.
Well done Mint!
http://smartbab...xy.blogspot.com
Do your pits smell like curry?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! like curry…HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Or masaladosa…. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
To “so” and “Josh”
Both of you are arseholes.
Perhaps your pits smell like ignorance racist trash.
Niyi i think you are the true racist.
josh, so and bill (probably all the same person) are just racist inbred idiots – ignore them.
It’s interesting that the average account balance is $5,000 with a credit debt of $2000. I don’t get why they don’t just pay that off. I mean do you really need another debt on your head – or are these people just playing conservatively in case they really need that money?
Surprising that shopping is up, people are trying to save by cost-cutting from entertainment – but they still continue to shop for non-entertainment purchases it seems.
One of the interesting things about mental accounting is that not only do people not consider dollars in different categories to be equivalent, but they also consider some categories more “reduction ready” than others. So even if they are overspending on their utility bills, for example, they are more likely to cut back on restaurant spending because it is more recession-ready.
Gif Dump,
….0% interest credit cards. No need to payoff free money.
“Gil – It’s interesting that the average account balance is $5,000 with a credit debt of $2000. I don’t get why they don’t just pay that off. I mean do you really need another debt on your head – or are these people just playing conservatively in case they really need that money?”
Gil I don’t think these number are accurate. The number I keep hearing from sources like WSJ and NYT is more like $10k-$15k which I think is still not accurate. What about all those people who refinanced their homes to pay off credit cards, buy cars and spruce up their houses? I’m guessing if you add this into the credit card column the avg. American owes more like $30k-$50k – not including their “direct” housing debt.
I really wouldnt put to much stock in parts of this analysis from Mint.
Firstly, I and a couple I know use Mint, and not all our accounts are linked to Mint. For instance, I have 4 bank accounts, but only linked Mint to 2 of them. The 2 I linked to Mint have only 3 to 7% of my money. So though the data points Mint has come up with are cool, they arent representative of whats really going on I’d bet.
@D Great point – it is nice to have some numbers from a user who is in the boat that I point to in my page 2 comment. Be interesting to know what accounts people have the most trouble getting into Mint, as they may not be evenly distributed: if it is more missing credit cards than savings, you may get skew.
The ability of economists and ordinary people to have real time information on the economy is very exciting. If Mint becomes widespread enough to aggregate data representatively across the nation then it would be the most reliable source of economic data there is – because it’s based on bank accounts.
I wonder if Mint has intentions to release the data on a more frequent basis.
release the data???? I think licensing (selling) it is more likely. And this is why I wouldn’t be interested in using their service.
Banks and credit card companies have always had this information, but have the good sense not to release it.
When scarcely a day goes by without a major security breach, including at supposedly secure banks and credit card processors, I would never consider letting any third party store login and password information to my financial institutions.
And this cavalier attitude toward members’ information confirms it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Ditto.
I’m no luddite, quite the opposite. But when GPS phones, GPS cameras (perhaps same as phones), and other location-based Web services are aggregated with data that companies like Mint collects, it makes me more than a bit cynical.
Cynical, yes. But this kind of transparency is faceless, no? It could be an incredible opportunity to correct our financial clusterf_*k once and for all.
Be cautious but not cowardly. The data and the information that it contains has enormous power to do good, and to empower people to make smart financial decisions.
The number of people that borrow through credit cards should show that there is drastic room for improvement on the way that personal finance is handled.
If Mint offers a service that helps people do this, and all they charge is the right to repackage and redistribute some personally-unidentifiable data so companies can make better product decisions and governments take more sound economic actions, all the more power to them.
Aaron, please bring your service to Canada sometime soon.
I joined Mint a couple months ago. As long as they keep my information anonymous, I have no problem with them sharing data. If they want to make conclusions about how many Starbucks drinks I have in a week, whatever, I’m just glad I can visually see where my money is going. The service is incredible.
@joe blow, don’t be silly. They’re not going to sell your personal information. But it’s a completely free service – they have to make money somehow. Companies with interesting data can use that to make money and grow their userbase indefinitely without ever having to charge them.
Sorry, but Mint’s numbers are absolute rubbish. The principle is interesting, the reality is failure though.
All Mint did, was capture the financial situation of people who are going to be more tech savvy, more educated, more financially secure. You are trying to tell me that the average American spends $300 on a financial advisor a month and only has a ~$2,400 in credit card balance? I am not sure I buy it. Looking at the graphs, something does not match the overall picture. If I had to guess, I would say that Mint is barely, if at all, representative of the American consumer.
Btw…. How about paying me for providing you with your data if you plan on selling it. I can take my data somewhere else, buddy. When is the revolution going to come where users that are actually making sites relevant though their content, get their fair share. I don’t think places like Yelp, Yahoo Local/Answers, Mint, etc. would be anything without user content. The relationship just seems lopsided.
Agreed that this data may be quite skewed from the real averages.
But regarding your last point, you’re missing that you’re getting paid in services. You wouldn’t sign-up on mint just to give them your data. You sign-up because they provide you services that let you visualize your data, manipulate it, etc. You’re “getting paid” in a different form, and it’s the incentive to sign-up in the first place. If the relationship truly were lopsided, they’d never have as many users as they do.
Marc, I agree with the first part of your post. The data is not at all a representation of the average American.
The second part doesn’t make sense. They are “paying you” by offering their service for free, and you give them some data. Seems like a good trade-off to me. If you aren’t interested in the tool, you don’t have to use it, and therefore you don’t have to offer Mint anything.
Seriously – why isn’t Starbucks paying ME to drink their coffee? I mean, when I bought a TV from Costco they got my name, address, credit card number – shouldn’t the TV at least have been free?!
I don’t know when these web companies are just gonna give up and stop trying to make money. The internet is for me and my friends to do as we please with no costs of ANY kind – the sooner we understand that the better.
Marc…spot on with the sample point, in fact as I was reading this post I was waiting for some information to appear that would indicate the sample consists of early adopters and affluent households. In principle it’s a novel idea to provide analysis from a different vantage point, but I wouldn’t give these stats any merit whatsoever as spending, savings or debt indicators. SF, NY are much different than Topeka. Not too generalize, but my guess is that many more people from SF are on Mint than Topeka.
But where we disagree is demanding payment from 2.0 sites. Yelp and Mint provide value to users whether is providing useful reviews or an outlet to be heard or organizing finances. You can also choose not to use these services if you do not want them making money off of your info, right? So if you keep coming back and using them, there’s your payment in the value you receive.
Marc, your fair share is “not having to pay for the service”. That’s not fair? Give me a break.
Man, some people actually got all flustered about the idea that content is more valuable than the shiny packaging around it. I wasn’t all that serious about the “revolution”. I guess I could have been a bit clearer about that.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with providing my content in a mutually beneficial relationship that attracts more users, which makes the site more useful to me, and the site can make more money on ads. The problematic issue arises for me when you consider the value of content in relation to the site (packaging). As a Newspaper is nothing but paper printed with the paper name, page numbers, the staff names, etc. without journalists’ articles, so is a page that heavily relies on user content absolutely nothing but a couple of frames without the user’s content. Even now, many sites are only marginally valuable because the don’t have the quality content outside of major urban areas. Just like a journalist, or a restaurant critic, will not work for free just for the satisfaction of being published, maybe one’s reviews should belong to the individual and he/she can determine who to share them with depending on the benefits. Granted, the relationships are slightly different now and need to find a balance. At some point, there is going to have to be an incentive for people to provide quality content to places like Yelp or Yahoo Local. I could see a market for professional reviewers, with portfolios of reviews that they share with content customers (i.e. yelp or yahoo) and maintain and update.
If you can find another site that you trust enough to be secure with your login information, that provides you a nice visual way to look at your expenses, AND pays you for the data you’re letting them see, then I’d love to see this site.
If on the other hand you’re just ranting and feel some vague sense of indignation that someone is making money by providing you a service, and this fictional site that you speak of doesn’t actually exist, then you clearly understand why no one will pay you for that information.
Mint.com could easily offer an economy predictor! Look at the drop from May to July! While the macroeconomic world was still digesting the tax refund spending, mint.com data shows we were headed for a significant drop. Agreed you’d have to see Y/Y data to really compare, but it looks like mint.com data “predicted” the economic downturn about a quarter before it was widely accepted and published.
Interesting, and promising for the future, but without year-over-year this is not that informative; all of this can be cyclical as freelance income and seasonal bonuses and holiday spending come around.
My thoughts exactly…in addition, for this data to accurately reflect a trend, it would also require normalization to negate the effects of inflation on spending, but what a treasure trove!
Having this kind of real-time data available could be worth billions to investors focused on index related funds which are heavily dependent on consumer spending (representing aprox. $8.4 trillion annually).
“not as bad as you might think”?
Peoplo who use Mint.com or, in general, the Internet are the privileged ones in this macroeconomic scenario. They, the middle-class, can afford it. But the rest….
Data is important, of course… but what kind of data are we talking about? rich and middle-class data?
Otherwise, kind of pretentious.
[sorry for my english]
Mint.com is free for anyone to use, but you are right in that most millionaires probably aren’t going to use it, and most poor people probably haven’t the slightest idea of how to. Nevertheless, it isn’t mint.com’s fault that its users are middle-class.
Then you agree with me and not with Aaron Patzer:
“Fortunately, Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively.”
But that’s not true, even if Aaron say it so, because there’s a bias in the data. And, sorry, but no one can argue against that.
That’s why I meant the post was kind of pretentious.
[Sorry for... you know
]
Couldn’t agree more. Even though they have 900k data points, I would want to see where those people live and what their median income is, professions etc. Probably significantly higher than the national average I would guess. Many early adopters of online services tend to be in that category. So while there may be some merit to this trend they’re showing, I wouldn’t consider Mint.com to be a great financial predictor of situation for the average American.
As interesting as the data is, the information above is near worthless without demographic information.
Having “nearly 1%” of the US population says nothing if we don’t know if it’s a representative sample or some highly biased group with unusual spending patterns. For starters, it’s a website – that in itself still causes bias; secondly, what type of person signs up to a money management website? Another, big bias.
Without that information there’s simply no justification from drawing conclusions about the population in general from the data.
It’s true that Mint’s data is skewed slightly male (60/40) and slightly younger than the general population. It is, however, geographically diverse. At $3900 – $4300 / mo in spending (~$48k / year) Mint is fairly representative of an average US household ($50-60k income). With a large enough sample size, you can make correct directional inferences, and compare relative scales.
Aaron
Slightly and slightly. Is this a double pendulum?
Exactly! The sample size is way too small to make major assumptions about the economy. Assuming there are 4 people in a household with roughly 300 Million people you are looking at a 1.2% sample size. I would certainly not take any action in the market off of these numbers.
Sounds like you’ve never taken a statistics course. A sample size of 1000 or so is plenty for reasonable levels – margin of error of +/- 3% – of uncertainty. This is regardless of the population being analysed.
That’s why news organisations do 1000-2000 person polls for elections that get 100,000,000 votes – it’s plenty accurate within a couple percent.
@ Salva…
Yeah, the people who have money are the ones that move the economy.
I’m not privileged to use the internet. I work for it and pay the bill to use it.
The economy moves through investment, not because we can pay the bill for Internet. Do you really think you move it when you pay your AT&T bill? or, instead, when you invest in AT&T buying stocks, making it grow up so they can hire people for new projects?
The REAL economy is huge different thing. And, if you want to make some kind of estimation about it, you have to exclude every possible bias. If not, data doesn’t worth it.
And yes, even if you don’t want to see it so, you’re one of the privileged. There’s a lot of people who can’t waste their time in the Internet.
[Sorry again for my bad english]
The data is probably well representative of the American economy (Americans are wealthy people – their middle class is more broad than others expect) but it covers those in the cutting edge, who are more likely to find new ways to keep having it good. We can accept the bias (and be glad the data is positive) and just ask if these people are finding new ways of they are plain unaffected.
Saying that Americans are wealthy is rather subjective. I can look rich and fab for a while if I buy a bentley and a mansion on credit, but am I?
If you scale the CIA world factbook 2008 est. imports and exports (spending and income) to a more personal level (divide by 20,000,000) America is like a big ol’ family that makes $68,850 a year, but spends $109,500 a year… spending $40,650 more than they make. On top of that, they are adding that $40,650 to a debt of $532,500 (present debt clock is $10.6 trillion) every year. The real debt, though (when counting all the debts the family is obligated to), is $2,820,000; which they are adding $40,650 more to each year.
@florin: By wealthy people you mean… a $10 trillion deficit wealthy people? really?
There is one obviously glaring absence in the spending categories… Medical Expenses. This category has been a rapidly increasing expense for most people (after the insurance paid in part by employers and in part by payroll deductions, which already decrease the income you can use for outgo). Are they hidden among the “Bills and Utilities” (Doctor Bills) or the “Shopping” (At the Drug Store)? And these are expenses most people don’t have much control over (you can’t make plans for your next illness or injury). NON-discretionary spending defined. It really shows the deficiencies in the way Mint.com is categorizing expenses, making them less useful both for these aggregate statistics and for individual budgeting. What the hey?
You bring up a good point! Mint only tracks what the user wants to track and Mint can track. The grossly overpriced crushing medical bill is not considered in this debt consideration.
Are mortgages included?
Is everyone going to include their student loan (which is not fun to look at)?
Are overdue bills included in the calculation? (Doesn’t do much good to track electric payments if you owe three months back)
etc…etc…etc…
According to his post, loans include loans mortgage, HELOC, student loans, and personal loans.
It does seem hard to believe that the average loan is only $50k. This goes against the notion of the average American carrying a massive mortgage.
Either that idea is a misconception, or this data does not truly paint a picture of the average American.
They should break that investment account into retirement and brokerage so we can see how stupid people are with their money. Having an 30k in an IRA account you cant get at without penalty is ok but if you have 50k in debt your standard brokerage account should be near empty.
“if you have 50k in debt your standard brokerage account should be near empty”
Not always the case. If that debt is student loan debt, much of that debt may be at such low interest rates (much of my wife’s is two-point-something) that it’s better to invest and make 6-8% return over 10 years than to pay off the loan faster.
That isn’t always the case, if your student loan is 3-4% then you might make money after taxes IF your investments can make 6-8% in this economy. Gambling for 1-2% a year after tax is hardly worth it when 8% pretax isnt exactly a safe bet.
Yeah demographic and geographic would definitely make this more believeable, although the potential for such close to date data is incredible. I hope Mint.com keeps this up and takes the advice of the guys above me for improvements in lessening the variable’s of this data.
We just talked about this in Marketing class and I feel like I’m gonna get extra-credit for even reading this lol
Spending data is strongly influenced by seasonal effects. From a 1 year data sample you can’t draw conclusions about a trend.
Dear Mint, we’re still waiting to be able to use you up here in Canada. KTHXBAI.
As with so many American web companies, I am sure Mint will just wait until someone in Germany puts out a clone and moves into all other markets. The American world ends at the border.
It is the way!
“The American world ends at the border.”
So sad, but so true.
Just want to plug Mint – it’s totally awesome! Love the way you’ve been able to track this.
Are these figures based on (1) all your members, or (2) thosemembers who have been with you for the entire period studied?
If it’s the first, then these results could be explained if “early adopters” are richer than the rest of us. Maybe you started with an unrepresentatively wealthy sample of people, and the numbers are falling as more ordinary people join and bring the averages down.
good point
nice post
lame comment
Could the drop shown in the above graphs come from the fact that the population using MINT could be changing?
If the usage of MINT quadrupled, maybe the start of MINT showed the more wealthy, technology-centric crowd and now it just is more the average of America?
Also, if you are poor, are you really going to sign up for MINT to have a constant reminder that you are poor? That also might skew these numbers.
I think some of the comments on the lack of statistical integrity of this are correct i.e. the numbers are probably affected by seasonal trends and changes in membership demographic as the site enters the mainstream.
What is incrediable is the efficiency this brings to all type of consumer market. Bank charges are a great example of this sort of bottom-up power: how brilliant that as a collective we can base our choice of bank on which truly have the lowest charges? We can now look beyond the PR/marketing efforts of these companies and see for ourselves which offer the most.
If you genuinely believe that mint, a company clearly making its money in data aggregation and statistics, has not normalized their data against these variables, then I think you’re very naive.
You mean that this site would have *all* my account details, for *every* account I have?! Yikes. I hope no one goes home with the company details on their laptop.
Hey Aaron – Thanks for sharing these stats; very informative. However, future posts should outline the demographics of your sample. This dataset could be 80% male with an average annual income of $100k+ and net worth of $2MM+. It’s unlikely, but who knows.
Good luck on reaching the 1 million user mark this year.
thanks Aaron for sharing this data. I would love to use mint.com but do not live in the us. It would be amazing to see Mint.com expanding wordwide. From what I see the TC award is absolutely justified.
PLEASE
@Morgan some governments give incentives to save in good times so that there is money in bad times.
Lets hope ppl are starting to spend more. I personally am spending more than I used to as I am in the fortunate situation that I did not say yes to any of the offers of cheap loan.
I guess the economic is a bit stable at the moment. Most of the finance people I knoe are waiting for the $800 Billion Obama Stimulus!
Another interesting point: despite gas prices being $4 gallon this summer, % of spend on gas and fuel is still quite low (<5% approximately). So, even though gas prices dropped by half by the end of 2008, total expenditure on ‘gas & fuel’ still remains paltry. Two questions from that:
1.) Is this typical, or do most mint.com users live in cities/drive less/take the train or cab?
2.) Why do people complain so much about gas prices?
Spending != health of finances.
As an example, my grocery shopping spend has risen by about 50% since this time last year – but that doesn’t mean I’m edging up the class ladder by buying more luxuries, it just means that the price of groceries has risen. If anything, I’ve cut out some luxuries to keep the rest of the rises as manageable as possible. Spend on groceries means nothing if it’s not linked to the price of the groceries. Worse than nothing, even, as it’s misleading.
The worst thing is that the ‘experts’ seem to miss this glaringly obvious point, along with all the others mentioned here (shifting demographics, demographic bias, seasonal trends, etc.). They’ll be lapping this up.
Thanks for the post Aaron, you arrogant f**k
Mint has a great concept.
I’ve written before we are great fans of firms that have the ability to perform detail data mining.
Un-related bit of news for M&A in the tech sector…
http://www.reut...=innovationNews
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Aaron – thanks very much for a great service. My wife and I have been using Mint since launch, and it has given us real-time transparency into our household spending/saving/investing. Before Mint, we had to do some serious number crunching and data consolidation in order to get the degree of clarity Mint offers.
My question: Is the above referenced data from only those Mint users that have been using your service since before Jan 2008, or do you lump in all newcomers throughout the year? If the latter, is the demographic of your 2008 additions sufficiently similar to the earlier users to avoid skewing your findings?
Best of luck to you and your team.
Great great great post. This is why I read TechCrunch.
Not an exhaustive study (or possibly even accurate) but the writer admits that and focuses on the way that a new start-up is showing some important data.
Let’s remember that 900,000 Mint’s customers are a (self) selection that statistically may not be indicative of the rest of the population. These 900,000 are the most internet savvy, possibly with higher income than an average US worker. Making economy-wide conclusions based on this data would be misleading.
$300 per month on “financial advisor”? I don’t think so. Does not make sense.
can you can meaningless information? i can. this guy panser is no economist and this is dangerous for techcrunch to even consider posting. and another reason customers might want to think type of about mint access to their financial data…
It would be nice if mint actually worked with Citizens Bank… Geezeo does… Quicken does… his product is not complete in it’s offering
until they have the ability to connect with everyone is this information really relevant?
Mint does work with Citizens
http://www.devn...upportcitizens/
Love the service and they surely have the power to provide good amounts of data, but Mint users are usually fortunate ones to have money. Who would want a third party to say, “You’re broke, son!”
Good read, great service. I would highly recommend Mint.com.
A++++++++ WOULD READ AGAIN
Sharing income data would add to this analysis … are savings down and loans up (in spite of decreased spending) due to a drop in income? Is that drop due to a change in employment status … meaning, does an increase in unemployment skew this analysis? If you left the unemployed out (about 6%+ of the workforce), how is the rest of working America doing?
I agree that the data is going to be skewed to the more tech savvy (younger, etc.); but it’s still a very valuable data point. It’s also much more detailed (at the household level) than what most economists at NBER, CEA, and the Fed have today … and those are the guys helping make Economic policy!
The problem is that people who are broke aren’t using Mint to manage their debt, so the numbers are biased.
They should be though as Mint rocks!
Do people not read the posts already left?
Let’s continue to focus on all the negatives that the last 5 readers commented on instead of focusing on the positives of a site like Mint!
As someone from CANADA I would love to be able to use a service like this. If more people adopted technology like Mint and took accountability for their spending maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess were in…or is it not that bad???
Dewd, get off your ass and write it yourself. Engineering-wise, it’s no SAP.
You can make those arguements about it being skewed demographically. Then you can take it further by saying the data is skewed geographically to urban/suburban areas. Take that further and further…
Some of the people’s arguements make it seem like the governments data is much better. When they say unemployment is 7%…what does that mean? You still need to slice the data based on: seasonal (summer/Christmas), age, state, job sector etc.
Once the sample size gets bigger (which in no doubt it will) and you can solve some of these problems with “non-conforming” data with smoothing out techniques with statistics.
VERY interesting data, that is hard to find ANYWHERE else!
I’m not thrilled that Mint is using its customer’s financial data to run these reports. I’m not sure it’s what their customers thought they were signing up for.
Then they arent paying close attention. As soon as I created an account and imported one credit card, I was able to see a graph comparing *my* monthly Starbucks purchases compared to the average Mint user’s monthly purchases.
It goes both ways. I put my data in the pool, but I also get to use it.
peace|dewde
terrific to see some real quantitative data on this topic… while a realize it’s only a sample, as with alexa / other similar services the directional info is likely quite relevant. and the more the userbase grows, the more relevant / accurate it will become.
nice job aaron — keep up the great work.
(disclosure: i’m a mint investor… and very happy to be one at that
Customer generated data should be owned by the customer. Opt-in is the only model for the future. Since Mint’s service is based on gathering data, maybe they should ask if a customer would allow gathering of aggregated data (http://www.mint...ty-policy/#a-13) , or would this destroy the business model?
Credit card and credit reporting agencies all provide aggregated data without asking my permission.
I at least have a choice to not use Mint if I don’t like what they’re doing with data, and I, a Mint user, have absolutely no issue with them using my anonomised data in exchange for the service they provide me.
I predict using Mint as a definitive source is every bit as accurate as the predictive models that kicked out AAA ratings for MBS’s and other CDO’s. The service is cute … nothing more, nothing less. The insights are valuable for advertisers on the website. Extrapolating the behavior of mint.com users as quantitative evidence of broad economic trends is at best disingenuous and arguably even outright dangerous if policy decisions are based upon this limited slice of data.
900,000 regular Mint users? This would suggest tens of millions of monthly page views and I don’t think is supported by other data – where does this number come from, is it audited, and if not … why?
Just to give a little insight from a competitor, the PF site space has not really agreed on what an “active user” really is yet. Does registration count? Do they have to check once a month? Do they have to have added bank accounts?
I’d actually love to hear your suggestions on what you think the proper definition is…feel free to shoot me an at matt@justthrive.com and maybe we’ll even do a blog contest about the right definition to use.
But I think this is a great question and I absolutely think that users should be holding us and other PF sites accountable for how we report the number of “users”.
I love Mint. New user. But the fact is, they do not integrate with every investment, brokerage firm, bank, etc. out there. Consequently, my overview and summary page is not accurate. My net worth is way off. My debt-to-savings ration is not even close to being accurate.
Mint data may be a good ballpark guess, but nothing more.
peace|dewde
http://dewde.com
Section 9 of their terms of service agreement spells out what rights you are granting them over your data. Nowhere in that section do you grant them permission to perform Statistical Analysis or a right to publish it, anonymously or otherwise. For a company claiming to be secure they have violated their own security. Sadly they have one of the worst terms of service agreements I have seen, that strips away your rights.
You couldn’t even be bothered to look at their security/privacy policy?
http://www.mint...ity-policy/#a-6
I had read it and it further makes my point. That section places contractual limits on what mint can do with the aggregate data and who it can disclose it too. As the whole world is not a legal organization the second clause does not apply and I am not a user of the service the third clause does not apply. The first clause is related to data not generated by user data, so it has no bearing, but if it did it would not cover the data being presented here. This section is written in narrow language not broad language or it would contain terms like “but not limited to” and “such as”. Because it is written narrowly, you cannot read more into it than what it says.
I take that back, you might be able to stretch the first clause to cover this kind of data but the limiting factor is in their examples. The examples is data not related to user data but data generated by their own site. If you remove the examples it would better apply.
If you look at the numbers, the uptick is around Christmas and the upward trends are shopping, gifts and home…Christmas stuff. I would like to see this extended out to January, February to see whether we have much of a trend.
Also, someone made the point that the typical Mint user is probably more financially secure than the average Joe, so the impact of a down-turn is softened.
I do use Mint, but even after sifting through data and making mental notes about mistaken transfers, I only look to Mint as a very general, vague idea of my finances. If anyone refers to this site as an economic indicator, then he or she is mistaken.
BOOO!! I don’t want to see Mint.com publishing data from their users to media outlets like this! I don’t care if it’s anonymized and aggregate! It sends the wrong message: that we’re all giving them our data so they can go off and do something with it, in this case: be a gd media pundit whoring for some PR.
Keep it secret! Keep it safe!
over the years i have engaged various record-keeping exercises like quicken and mint as a way of seeing and rationalizing where my money is going…but in the end it strikes me as a waste of time. okay so i spend 40% of my income at the grocery store. so what? is this actionable? no. it may be that if i drove a half hour away and went to some ghetto grocery store that stocks day-olds, i might be able to save 20%, but the truth is i am not going to do this. same for practically every other bill. i don’t hold a cc balance so spamming me with card offers is pointless….
The numbers look about right
Dear Professionals,
I am a undergrad student and I have developed a breakthrough solution.I developed many proposals and send to many companies ,no esponse.
Please guide me how to make some company to read your propsoal(unsolicited)?
What is right method?
Proposals to companies… What is it that you want? For some company to steal your idea from you? To hire you? What? Companies are not here to take outside ideas and implement them. A company usually already has an idea of their own that they are working on. Maybe you need to send your proposal to a venture capitalist, so you can start your own company. Don’t hold your breath. Everyone has a breakthrough idea. I have about 14 sitting around.
No.
I have complete soution,company,product,service to sell.
I want to sell it.
What is right procedure to do it.
How to make companies to read your proposal while it is of great important for them?