Mint first impression

So after reading that they won TechCrunch 40 and then plenty of follow up press I decided to give Mint a try.  I have been using either MS Money or Quicken for years and would love to find something that made this a simple task.

It was quick to set up and within minutes I had the major accounts in the system and could review my transactions.  I had an issue with one Credit Union account (and they still haven’t sorted it – more later) but the others were easy.   There are several features that make this a nice service:  cost – its free, the ability to access this whenever and wherever, and the alerts you can place on the accounts.

So you can’t beat the price and you get plenty of value out of the service.  It would be great to see them evolve into a premium product as well that might let you enter transactions or bills much like the software products and online banking services.  This would make it easier to see where you are heading rather than where you are coming from.

Having an online service is great since most of the finances are on home computers and you often want to check something while at work or out of town.  And since it is a service that is always updating on its own you save time when you just pop in to get a quick summary.

The alerts are as good as or better than those available to me with my current tools, Quicken for the Mac and online banking.  Simple alerts like large transactions are great to keep up with those big items and can sway your balances.

The only issue I have so far is that I haven’t been able to add a credit union account, now for over a week.  Initially I understood they were overwhelmed but I am now getting anxious to have all my accounts added.  They did recently change the error message to state that they have submitted the issue and will take a look.  My email to them only generated what looked like a form response that didn’t really address my question.

So I will keep using for now, let’s see if their business model holds up and whether over time I still get what I need to manage my finances.