Online Personal Finance

UPDATE: 12.21.09

Quote:

From Mint.com, we will incorporate:

• Extra money management power: from the ability to track investments, to additional budgeting functionality to help you save and do more with your money.
• Access to Mint.com’s Savings Engine, which uses a patent-pending algorithm to analyze spending trends and finds ways to save money – on average at least $1,000 on the first visit – by showing you the best checking and savings accounts, optimal credit cards, the best interest rates on CDs and more, all tailored specifically to your financial situation.

From Quicken Online, we’re going to continue to offer the tools you’ve grown to love

• The ability to enter and manage cash purchases or checks that haven’t yet cleared.
• The combined product will support all 14,000 financial institutions currently served by Quicken Online – up from roughly 8,000 currently supported by Mint.com.
• An upgraded iPhone application that includes the popular ATM finder.

It’s a great thing, being in the position that enables you not to worry about price. To purchase items solely based on wanting that particular thing in a unique situation.

Unfortunately few people can support such a habit, including me. This puts most of us in a position of needing to watch how we spend our money.

In attempt to find a free online budgeting tool I searched Google for Online personal finance and found  Quicken’s online finance tool. After playing with it for awhile, there was a need to find something better… fortunately there’s Mint.com.  Here’s a quick comparison of Quicken vs. Mint.com.

Personal Finance Online – Quicken Versus Mint

Set Up

The process of setting up is nearly identical. You have to create an account, specify your bank, and then provide your login information to your bank account.

Transaction Import

For a long time I’ve thought that you get what you put into software. It’s very much the case for these products, but both these sites help save time by automatically categorizing your transactions. Mint.com does a better job, but Quicken allows you to import more than 90 days of transaction history.

Maintainence

In order to take advantage of the “trending” and “budgeting” functionality of these websites, it’s important to take the time properly categorize all transacations… despite the auto-categorization. You can imagine a pie chart with hundreds of categories not being very useful.

Both sites have similair search capability. For example you can search  for a category like grocery, a word in the description, or the name of a restaurant then edit to ensure accurate trending reports.

This was the kicker for me. Mint allows you to edit/categorize  multiple transactions easily, while you can spend hours doing the same thing manually with Quicken.

Budgeting

While there is a way to budget with Quicken, it’s not really apparent how to do so and I didn’t waste time trying to figure it out.

Mint has a great planning tab that sets budgets based on transactional history! Of course you can change those as you please. It also shows you transactions that you might want to set a budget for, but haven’t yet. You can easily “create a budget” of ongoing utility bills… or even for a once occurring debit like a snowboarding pass.

Trending

The ability to crunch data into visual representations is incredibly insightful. Both sites do a good job, but once again Mint comes out on top.

Updating Transactions

As far as I could tell Quicken doesn’t specify how often transactional history gets updated.

Mint is updated upon login and also has a nice little update button so you can always be looking at fresh data.

In Conclusion

Mint’s categorization is far superior, making it easier to see what’s actually happening to your money. The design is more intuitive and in combination with the budgeting tool they absolutely destroy all attempts Quicken has made to translate their product into a free online personal finance service.

PS…

These are my take aways over the last few days… so if you have more knowledge on this topic… feel free to comment.

UPDATE:

Mint.com is going to be acquired by Quicken. Although they say it’s not going to affect constant improvements, we’ll have to see. The whole deal is to be finalized by the end of the year.