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I tried using both Quicken Online and Mint.com’s free online personal financial services this week.  I ended up ditching Quicken and keeping Mint because Mint’s interface was cleaner and it seemed better able to categorize transactions.  I found the reporting that Mint offered made it really easy to see where my money was going (most frequently to Panera Bread, my favorite quick eats establishment) by individual vendor or by category.   You can also do interesting activities like comparing your shopping habits against people in other metropolitan areas or states.  Using this site makes me want to pay by debit/credit card more than cash since it can be tracked better.  As mentioned earlier, Mint.com is free, and it appears they subsidize their offering by showing financial services like credit cards or checking accounts that might save you money over your existing services.  I looked at a couple of recommendations and they weren’t bad.

One thing that both Quicken and Mint was lacking though was a way where you could manually track accounts/investmnents that weren’t online, such as cash on hand or the value of your house.  This surprised me since that seems like such an easy thing to do.  My friend Mark and I joked about making a lame website where you could enter the details for accounts like that and then allow Mint.com and other places to fetch the data via web service calls.

Update: The reply to Mark’s forum message said that manually tracking accounts was coming soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 4:26 am and is filed under finance, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.