Mint.com has quickly become the hippest personal finance management website. In some ways Mint competes with Mvelopes, the online budgeting program that helps you to allocate your money before you spend it, but Mint does a bit more. It makes managing your money fun while taking almost all of the work out of it. In five minutes you can open an account, enter your bank and credit card info, and you are done. Mint will pull all of your balance and transaction information and provides great graphic detail of your financial life.
Not only does Mint break down your spending behavior, it will alert you when your balance is low, when a bill is due or when you have overspent your budget. But wait, there’s more! Mint.com also give you personalized money savings tips based on how you are spending your money.
But is Mint Secure?
Mint consolidates all your accounts, creates pretty pictures and offers great advice based on all of the financial data it has pulled from your accounts. That’s great, except you have to give them your bank account numbers and passwords to all your financial accounts. All it takes is one smart hacker to get access to your Mint account to see all your personal finance data. Are you comfortable with that?
You can feel confident that your data with Mint.com is safe. After you enter your banking information in your account, your user names and passwords cannot be viewed in any way. Your data is not stored in any way, and financial transactions cannot be made with Mint. That means Mint employees and Mint hackers will never have access to this information.
Mint.com also uses Yodlee, the same online banking service provider that is used by leading US financial institutions. You can feel confident your account is safe and sound with Yodlee, as they are audited by the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, among others.
If you have multiple bank and credit card accounts, which most people do, Mint.com can actually provide an extra level of security. Since it is unlikely for you to check all of your accounts on a daily basis for unusual transactions, Mint can provide a one-stop-shop to view all accounts. You can even create alerts for Mint to inform you of suspicious activity and changes in account balances.
For more information on Mint.com’s security, visit the Is Mint Really Secure forums. Otherwise, another popular option is to test drive Mvelopes program for free.
Millionaire Money Habits: It is tough to build wealth if you can’t keep your money. While the many personal finance software programs that exist can simplify your life and help you achieve your financial goals, make sure your identity and account information is safe and secure.
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I absolutely LOVE Mint.com. I’ve recommended it to everyone I know. It has made my life much easier. I’m part of the beta test group for their investment tracking too, so not only are all of my bank accounts and my credit card (the only one) in one place, now I can see my 401k transactions too. It’s the best tool I’ve used for tracking, ever.
I have been using Mint for about 9 months now and really like it. I have also been using a direct competitor of theirs for nearly the same amount of time - Yodlee. Yep, that’s right the same service that mint uses actually provides a consumer facing website that offers many of the same (and in some cases more) tools than mint does.
The big advantage Mint has is their graphing capabilities are slicker and you can compare your spending vs others in your state. However, Yodlee offers a lot more types of account integration including cell phone providers, frequent flyer miles, etc and Yodlee has a far more extensive alerting system. The UI isn’t as slick but it is definitely worth a look if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of your financial situation.
https://moneycenter.yodlee.com
I’m not sure I’d go so far as you do in feeling confidant that Mint/Yodlee is secure — the log-in information *is* being stored, even if it is currently accessible in any way, so there’s certainly the potential for inadvertent or deliberate security breaches.
That being said, I tend to agree with you that the benefit of being able to check all your accounts at once quickly outweighs the security risks — I have a bunch of credit cards and checking accounts and the like, and the only way I’m able to keep track of them is through using something like Yodlee/Mint.
I’m glad to hear Mint.com is secure. My wife stumbled upon the
website reading a magazine last week and we just started trying it.
Despite the many financial institutions it cooperates with it still
doesn’t have our credit union. I’ve put in an email request and
have only received generic email replies, which so far renders
Mint.com useless to us. Happy it works for others though, seems
like a great concept.
The writer of this article has over-simplified the security risks.
Just because they use Yodlee doesn’t mean it’s secure. The truth
is, your login information traverses Mint systems. Therefore, Mint
employees and contractors COULD gain access to your information.
This article is really just a bias commercial for Mint. I used it,
and it’s got potential, but let’s be real; it’s still in beta and
buggy.
Correct. This article simply repeats the marketing crap from
Mint.com. Mint says “sure we’re secure.” Don’t worry we got your
back. Do they take responsibility for any theft/misappropriation of
your funds? Absolutely NOT. They (or Yodlee, whoever they are) have
the same info you have to access your bank account or investment
accounts online. If you gave a hacker this info, he would suck your
money out of your accounts before you could blink an eye. The law
says you’re only liable for the first $500 of loss on each account,
if you notify the financial institution within 2 days. What if you
go on vacation for a week. Oops. Bye-bye retirement. Bye-bye house.
Bye-bye car. Bye-bye tomorrow night’s dinner. You would have to be
out of your freaking mind to give any organization except maybe the
US Treasury the info you have to give Mint in order for it to do
what it does. They could never be hacked? Never is a very long
time. Think about the risk. Think. DO NOT BELIEVE SELF-SERVING
STATEMENTS. Use your common sense.
The weak link in the chain is they use email addresses. No log in
name and no security questions when asking for a lost password
request. That is one part of the key to breaking it. Everyone has
access to someone’s e-mail address the other part is guessing their
email password or if you know someone that may be the easiest part.
So unless you have a very difficult e-mail password you are open to
this weak link of someone getting on a computer logging in with
your name at Mint and request a forgotten password and then getting
your e-mail with the change of password.