Mint Review (2021): Is This Truly The Best Budgeting App For Personal Finance?

Mint is an ideal option if you need an easy-to-use app for monitoring your expenditures and maintaining track of your spending. Instead of visiting several websites to review your bank account or credit card balances, this free software helps you to display it in one place. In this Mint summary, I’ll go through the service’s fundamentals, so you know exactly what to expect before you sign up.

What Is Mint?

Mint.com is the most commonly used Web-based personal finance planner in the world. It keeps track of all of your financial expenses, assists you in creating and sticking to a schedule, and allows you to set financial goals.

Mint automatically downloads the financial data so that you can review expenses and build budgets after you choose the accounts you want to handle during the initial setup. Your financial details are automatically changed any time you open the app.

Mint displays the financial information in an easy-to-navigate system with attractive graphs and charts. Mint now provides a web-based edition that allows you to manage your money from the comfort of your own home using a laptop or desktop computer.

Intuit is behind the program (the founder of TurboTax and QuickBooks). Mint offers consumers a free credit score which alerts them when they go over target, among other items. Mint will even send you reminders, so you don’t skip a deposit, and it will also keep track of your bills for you.

Although it has certain flaws, few competitors offer such a robust set of resources for getting a complete image of your financial situation. Plus, it’s completely free.

How Does Mint Work?

Mint seamlessly syncs the data from various financial entities with a single password, providing you with a complete image of how much and on what you invested. Mint will help you categorize your transactions and maintain track of where your money is headed.

Through practice, you’ll be able to arrange your finances with graphs and maps that show you your monthly expenditures in detail.

Simply put, Mint is a budgeting app that you’ll use.

You add your banks, credit cards, and bills after you’ve created your account. Any bank in the United States will do. If you want to keep track of monthly bills or credit card numbers, you may do so as well.

Mint will also help you keep track of your debt (such as student loans or mortgages) and savings accounts (such as IRAs). Mint pulls multiple months of data through your accounts to give you a clear understanding of how you’re doing to help you evaluate your expenses the best way possible.

How Much Does It Cost?

Mint is free to use if you consent to allow them access to your data. Don’t worry; your information is safe; however, Mint can use your financial information to make suggestions to help you save money. That’s how they make their profit.

E.g., if you’re paying 18 per cent interest on a credit card, Mint might note and suggest a new credit card with a balance transfer deal, for which they’ll be charged. 

As a consequence, Mint would not cost you much, which is a big plus.

Mint Features

Budgeting and Tracking Expenses

Mint’s core function is budgeting and cost monitoring, and it excels at it. Budgeting is straightforward to set up: upon downloading and syncing the purchases, they would be instantly grouped across predefined categories. You may build your subcategories, but you can’t alter the most significant ones.

After your purchases have been downloaded, you can make modifications to them. You’ll need to change the auto-categorization from time to time since it’s far from flawless. On the other hand, Mint would remember your purchases and put them in the appropriate categories throughout the future.

Creating and Managing Goals

Goal monitoring and management functionality is another helpful feature. New milestones are easy to set up and reflect in your monthly budgeting, such as paying down credit card balance or saving for a new house.

Monitoring Credit Scores

Mint recently launched a free credit score monitoring feature, making it as simple as signing in to keep track of your entire financial profile. Press the “Show Details” button to see your credit score, payment history, credit account age, and other information. There is also the option to switch to a premium edition.

Mint.com’s operation seems to be more geared toward the general public. It excels at budgeting and spending monitoring, but its investment section is, at best, superficial. It’s much easier than Intuit’s Quicken and lacks certain functions, as is the case for most of Mint.

Financial hub

One of the most vital aspects of Mint (which is owned by Intuit, the company behind TurboTax and Quicken) is that it gathers all of the financial data in one place. Mint’s dashboard helps users to display nearly any part of their financial lives after they’ve signed in and connected their accounts:

• Credit card and bank account balances
• Investment results
• Credit score
• Even home valuation (provided by partner Zillow)

Automatic syncing 

Mint makes it easy to get a quick view of your expenses. To get started, choose an account provider, such as Bank of America, and sign in using Mint’s website or mobile app. The service then draws together all of the account details to briefly glimpse account balances, transactions, and even outstanding bills. (If users like, they will tell Mint to “forget” an account later.)

Mint begins categorizing transactions automatically, but one of the more critical consumer complaints is that the categories are frequently incorrect. Users may correct inaccurate types and break transactions, such as dividing ATM transactions from cash purchases.

Mint also provides a budget for the customer right away, letting them exactly how much they spent on, say, food that month and how much the program expects they can pay based on previous purchasing habits and overall spending in that category. Budgets, like the rest of the tool, can be personalized.

Trends overview 

The Trends tab offers users a brief snapshot of their financial position, including how much they’ve invested in shopping, grocery, food and eating, and entertainment. Users can quickly customize the period by choosing from choices like this month, the last seven days, or the previous 14 days or making a personalized window and matching a month to month or year to year.

How Does Mint Make Money?

This is recognized as the freemium model since it is free to access, and there are no hidden costs. “How does Mint make revenue from this free service?” you might think. It generates money by recommending various financial services for which Mint receives a referral charge or by making you money by endorsing multiple financial assistance for which Mint gets a referral fee. To monetize users, Mint recently added ad banners to different sections of the website. Additionally, premium access to the credit report is now accessible.

Mint also sells financial details in bulk (not your confidential information) to several businesses. This provides data on customer purchases, total credit card balances, and the number of savings accounts a person has, among other things. However, it is necessary to remember that the data is gathered secretly and does not relate to individual use.

How Mint Security Protects Your Information

Mint was designed to help you manage your money. As a result, it takes your safety seriously.

Mint has a range of protection features that it claims are comparable to those provided by your bank. It primarily relies on 128-bit SSL encryption and third-party monitoring via places including TRUSTe and VeriSign.

You will use a unique PIN to sign in to your Mint account after you’ve synced your accounts using your bank’s login information.

Furthermore, the details you use to sign in to Mint are kept in a different database protected by hardware and software encryption. If your phone is missing or lost, you can remotely uninstall your account from another machine or mobile device.

Mint also remotely checks user accounts for suspicious spending behaviour, so if anything appears that you didn’t approve, you’ll get a warning right away.

The more you are aware of these issues, the sooner you will fix them and restore your accounts to good standing.

Pros and Cons

Planning and preparing a budget is essential if you want to realize your financial goals. Mint has everything you need to get you started on the path to doing so. After using Mint for a while, I’ve discovered the following significant advantages and disadvantages of the free budgeting tool:

Pros

– Functionality: Mint has a wide range of features that correlate favourably to similar budgeting instruments.

– Budgeting: You can connect financial accounts to monitor your expenses and generate a sample budget automatically.

– Cost: Accessing the website and software is free.

– Comprehensiveness: Mint features a detailed financial rundown, including finances, a free credit score, and more, in addition to budgeting tools.

– Reminders: You can set reminders to help you keep on track with your budget to pay your bills on time.

Cons

– Personal Details: To connect your accounts to Mint, you’ll need to enter usernames and passwords, but this information is safely encrypted and secured.

– Savings: Mint does not encourage you to control your investments effectively. You can connect your investment accounts so that they all appear on the same tab.

– Ads: Since Mint is free, you should expect to see advertising and discounts on the website and app.

Mint Vs Competition

You Need a Budget (YNAB)

The YNAB app is famous in part because it seeks to treat every single penny as a source of income. They pay for all of the non-recurring costs and support you in changing your expenditures as you exceed your spending limits.

YNAB has features that enable you to manage your finances on several devices also with a partner. In addition, you can quickly chart your progress while saving money. In reality, according to YNAB, users save an average of $600 in the first two months and more than $6,000 in the first year.

Though YNAB does cost $11.99 a month (or $84 per year), they have a loyal fanbase that proves they can genuinely support people and succeed in their finances, making them well worth the money.

Personal Capital

Personal Capital competes with Mint a bit, but it’s in a separate league for the most part. The budgeting part is where it “competes.” Personal Capital does have a budgeting feature in their applications, but I don’t think it corresponds to apps like Mint.

When you have a lot of savings to handle, you’d use Personal Capital – that’s where they shine. You can chop up all sorts of data for them, much as you can with Mint for your spending. However, I can just use it for budgeting if I was still monitoring my investments with Personal Capital.

MoneyPatrol

MoneyPatrol provides a beautifully pleasing GUI with maps and graphs that help you maintain track of your expenses. Connect it to your bank accounts and go on with your life as normal. You’ll see your most recent purchases, expenditure patterns, and a glimpse of your financial wellbeing every time you log in.

The calendar, which displays your spending for each day of the month, is one of my favorite features. This can be very helpful in determining where your money goes per month.

Who is Mint for?

I will suggest Mint to someone who wants to get a firmer grip on their finances. It’s free, so there’s no need to think about signing up for a free trial or paying monthly; all you have to do is connect your accounts and let the app evaluate your spending habits.

When it comes to budgeting applications, I usually categorize people into two groups: those who choose to be hands-off and prefer to be more hands-on. Mint truly tries to blend the best of all worlds in this situation. You can be as hands-off as you want until you’ve had a few things set up. However, if you need to, you can micro-manage any single purchase.

Overall, anybody interested in investing more money and consuming fewer can give Mint a shot for at least a few weeks.

Who is Mint not for?

The security-conscious people out there might not be Mint’s target audience.

Mint won’t perform as well if you’re like Agent Mulder from the X-Files and don’t want to connect all of your info. That isn’t to suggest you can’t use Mint; nevertheless, rather than going through the trouble of logging it on an app, I prefer using a pen and paper.

How to Keep Your Mint App Account Safe

Even though Mint’s security appears to be somewhat robust, there are a few items you can do to ensure that your account data is kept as secure as possible.

Create a separate email address

For one instance, you may sign up for Mint with a different email address.

If someone manages to get a glimpse at Mint’s records, you won’t have to think about phishing scams being sent to your daily inbox.

Continually update your bank/credit card passwords.

You can still change your bank and credit card codes daily, whether you have a money management app like Mint.

You’ll still want to make sure you’re not using a password through several accounts.

You can make the passwords much more secure by making them lengthy and containing a combination of numbers and characters.

To ensure whether your accounts are syncing correctly, make sure you check your details on Mint before you make these adjustments.

Don’t use Mint over unknown Wi-Fi services

Finally, you should avoid utilizing Mint over public Wi-Fi networks and be wary of granting third-party access to the account through Facebook or other applications.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Mint

If you’re only signed up for Mint, or you’ve had an account for a while but aren’t sure how to make the best out of it after filing your taxes with TurboTax, here are five things to bear in mind.

Link As Many Accounts As Possible

This is the most reliable way for Mint to get a view of your finances. According to the website, you would be required to include your usernames and passwords. However, they will be maintained safely in a separate database utilizing multi-layered hardware and software encryption.

Add Other Accounts Manually

You may manually connect an account with a financial institution or lender that isn’t specified on Mint. Select “Settings,” “Property,” and “Add a property” to do so. You will then pick the form of property you want to include, such as real estate, a car, cash or debt, or something else. Then you should fill out the rest of the form. It’s important to remember that these profiles aren’t immediately changed, so be sure to update that if anything changes.

Fix Transactions That Are Not Categorized Correctly

Mint can make an error as it pulls your spending data and automatically categorizes your transactions. You may adjust the type by moving to the “Transactions” page, choosing the transaction, then pressing “Edit information.”

Track Cash Spending From the App

You can manually monitor your purchases in the Mint app if your budget with currency. Log in and press “Add a transaction” to fill out the form. Your spending and cost monitoring would be precise and up to date as a result.

Customize Your Alerts

Set up reminders and updates if you’re monitoring your expenditure with the Mint software on your phone or Mint.com. This is a brilliant way to make the most of getting all of your accounts connected in one location.

Availability and Ratings

Mint is a budgeting app for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch available in the App Store (for iOS). It’s also available for download on Google Play (for Android).

• App Store rating: 4.7 out of 5 
• Google Play Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Mint Review: Final Thoughts

Keeping hold of your finances is more critical than ever in these times of financial instability. Mint is a good option for people who want to monitor and control their expenses, expenditures, savings plans, and finances because of its ease of use and clever mix of personal finance resources. This awareness helps consumers to have a good effect on their financial future. Mint is a strong option for simple budgeting, goal-setting, and credit-score monitoring. Since Mint.com is free to access, you may as well sign up and check it out today.

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