The Personal Finance Tool problems began…
It was sometime around Thanksgiving 2005. Holiday shopping was starting – that meant expenses – and it was time for a financial review. Since starting a couple of small businesses back in 1997, I had been using MS Money and then Quicken to manage my finances. Well, maybe “manage” is not quite the right word. I used Quicken to link all my bank, credit card, and IRA accounts so that I could figure out how much money I had and where it all went.
Problem was I got busy; I hadn’t kept up with Quicken in many, many months. And that meant trouble. Really all I wanted to see was how much I spent on gas and groceries, and maybe learn if I was buying too many DVDs on Amazon. But to figure all of that out, it was going to take a whole Sunday’s worth of work.
Now fortunately I already had Quicken set up. If you don’t, you’ll need to:
- Drive to Best Buy
- Buy it for $30-70
- Install it
- Click through no fewer than 29 screens to link just one credit card and one bank
(fyi: with Mint it takes ~90 seconds and 2 screens)
Even though setup takes half an hour minimum, that isn’t the real problem since it’s a one time thing. For me, it wasn’t even importing data from my online accounts that was problematic. The real issue is that it just didn’t do anything with that data.
I could see all of my transactions, true, but in order to see where my money went, I had to sit there and categorize almost every one of them. Quicken auto-categorized maybe 40% of transactions (many of which were grossly mis-categorized), and when I tried MS Money, it was even worse (it got maybe 15% of my transactions). That left several hundred transactions to categorize. I just wanted to see a pie chart of my spending! Also, if you haven’t synched Quicken in a long time, there will be gaps in your history. When that happens, Quicken asks you to manually balance and reconcile your account. It’s a computer program, why can’t it balance things itself?
Okay, so at this point I could have invested an afternoon into categorizing transactions.
But instead of putting hours of work into the system to have that glorious 5 minutes analyzing a nice chart of my spending, I took a different tact: I started a company to make personal finance effortless.
Organize your financial life.
Use Mint.com to see where your money goes, get bill reminders & alerts, track your investment performance, and find extra savings. It’s FREE! More
I can’t wait for the beta! Hurry! I’m getting broker by the second!
I better get an invite when i get out of bootcamp
(6 weeks from now)
Of course you will Ralph. good luck with bootcamp. We will help you with all that money you get from the army;P
Hoku, we are working hard to get it perfect for you.
If you guys get this right, it’ll change my whole freaking life. I don’t know how many times I’ve built excel models by hand because MS Money or Quicken just sucked. Here’s to hoping you nail it.
We are trying hard to do that Brian!
You are so right about how much it sucks to use Quicken!
I use Google Spreadsheets isn’t not that much better than Excel so I’m dying to finally see MyMint. Student loans are killing me.
I’ll be a one sorryass critic here :).
I use Quicken, and I don’t sync my bank accounts and my credit card accounts and my foreign accounts and my stock options and … a lot of things. I enter them manually and my wife enters them manually. It takes 15mins to half an hour every saturday. It’s worse when we come back after vacation.
But, I know my exact financial situation every damn moment I want to know it. I know how much money we have in Europe and what’s our net worth ;). I can tell my wife (or vice versa) a very precise number.
And we have everything categorized and very well categorized. And we can estimate our taxes. And of course we can enjoy seeing all these shiny graphs and balance shits.
As a little extra recently I installed a pocket PC version of Quicken which is synchronized with my main computer and now I’m able to enter all the transactions I make every day regardless of how far I’m from my home.
Guys, Quicken is a very tough competitor and it’s definitely not sucking. They put a boatload of money into personal financing planning software market, they have good established brand and people TRUST them. Don’t underestimate this fact.
If you want to acquire millions of customers TRUST is the most important asset to build. Not the 90 secs against 30 minutes even though it sounds really cool.
I’ve given my parents and sisters money checkups in the past few weeks, trying to get them out of their habit of overspending and not watching where their money goes. The biggest hurdle is ease of use for them…. I can’t wait to get them in on this - and that goes for myself as well!
Danis,
Interesting perspective on the strengths of Quicken.
There is a certain subset of people who actually seem to _like_ manually entering all their transactions, balancing their checkbook, categorizing every transaction themselves, and calculating the tax consequences of amortizing a loan to cover the strike price of an equity grant. If you have an extra hour each week (every week), and like to do accounting, maybe Quicken is for you.
Truth is, Mint is not a head-to-head competitor with Quicken. Mint is focused on a younger demographic (20-45), helps people track their spending, and saves its users money on everyday expenses. Quicken targets an older demographic (40-65), with a heavy emphasis on retirement and tax consequences.
If you want to set something up in 2 minutes flat, not have to learn new software, and have everything done automatically for you (no data entry, no categorization, no balancing), then Mint is for you.
Dude, Danis -
You sound like the person I’d like to be but just don’t have the time to become. I’d love to have that kind of discipline, and definitely recognize the benefits of it - that’s why I have a surfeit of excel files floating around on my PC that are meant to help me do it.
I’ve gone through periods where i’ve used either Quicken or MS Money, but the moment l get busy and behind, a 15 min update becomes an afternoon overhaul and I’m left deciding between a BBQ w/ friends or spending the evening figuring out my finances. Being human, I generally go for the BBQ. I’m ready for a quick and simple solution that has a great autopilot. I trust Quicken and I trust MS, but I’ve used them and found them clumsy. They just didn’t make it easy enough. I definitely am ready to try out myMint.
In terms of market share and all that, I agree, the personal finance space is insanely crowded. And if any of the big guys decided to build a product that addresses some of the concerns Mint hopefully will, things could get interesting fast. But as a consumer I’m still chilling here w/ basically un-monitored finances waiting for my dream product. Let’s hope Mint delivers on the promise.
Brian C - I could really go for some BBQ right about now..
I’m in the same camp as Danis, apparently … and I often wonder if Quicken loves me as much as I love their software. Probably not. Can’t be.
I will NEVER let Quicken download my transactions. I’m a control freak when it comes to this — I am the Wacky Factor, as it were — and the day I let Quicken or any other software auto-categorize my transactions is the day they can put me in the deep-freeze.
I think there are maybe 12 of us out there with this condition. So that still leaves a nice fertile consumer base for you kids to target.
Not to suggest anything crazy but being self employed for so long I have always been the type to be on the run and miss the days which turn to months to keep up with Quicken as well. I tried something with an autoresponder just for me with a form in it that reminded me via e-mail to fill out all the information for the day, mainly money spent on all of the major sections to keep receipts for like gas, groceries, office supplies, etc… If I didn’t fill out the form I would get an annoying reminder to do so until I did. This way I never forgot. But I am sure this could be extended to SMS on the phone or more.
Any way to offer this up as an offical suggestion Aaron?
Chris,
With Mint, you never have to manually enter any data - data is pulled in automatically each night from linked accounts (credit cards, banks). Perhaps there is no need for an SMS reminder to “enter data”.
We certainly will have email and/or SMS reminders for late fees & charges, bill reminders, major changes in spending, large transactions, etc.
What else would you like an SMS reminder for?
Thanks for the reply Aaron! Basically to elaborate I sometimes use cash, a lot, and I just have the receipts from everything piling up in my in accordian file in different sections.
If a form was e-mailed to me where I can put the totals in from the day/week for these types of expenses I can track them much more efficiently and then at tax time I won’t have to scramble to calculate receipts. The SMS could be a secondary reminder if set per-say to fill out the forms.
Does that make more sense?
Seems an ambitious product, I’m interested to see when something is released. (I too use my own series of interlinked Excel sheets which are fueled by downloaded transaction ledgers from bank sites)
How does auto-categorization work? Do you simply string parse the transaction names and run a lookup versus a categorized database of companies?
How are you addressing security and how large is your security team? With banks and credit card companies being compromised I’m more than a little concerned about my entire financial life stored in one convenient, online package.
[...] Patzer from MyMint write about the problems with many financial programs such as Money and Quicken. Considering that MyMint makes a competing product, the post hit me as a [...]
Whats the fundamental problem with any hosted software ? Why long term prospects of mysalesforce.com, google spreadsheets, office live etc are dim ?
Well, these things are hosted. What happens when the ISP switches off your connection because you forgot to pay your bill, or the goverment mandates shutting down your site because they don’t like the content, or you disagree with paying more but can’t do much about it.
Does it sound too far fetched ? It happens often and in each and every case if you were using hosted applicaiton you are literally and figuratevely hosed. Your data belongs to you, not to google, salesforce, goverment of china or FBI or even a site like mymint. This is why Quicken and MSFT are going to do very well and mymint is going to be another cute valley startup built not to last but to be sold to google or yahoo or another aggregator of the moment that is in the business of collecting eyeballs and clicks, not in the business of personal financial software.
The data is new intel inside.
I use a word doc as a journal with a discptrion of what I buy with date and amount, and a spreadsheet for tracking checks, and deposits.
Doc explame below:
Income:
March 23: $55.00
Expenses:
Coffee(3/23): $4.59
Gas(3/23): $14.47
Total: $19.06
Net income: $35.94
And so forth….
Interesting conversation on the relative merits of Quicken versus the Mint “concept”. I have tried a number of personal finance programs, including both Quicken and Money, and have found it virtually impossible to keep up with the number of transactions…even with Money automagically syncing my account transactions (until it mysteriously stopped doing so last month). Even worse, however, is that both Money and Quicken seem to be constitutionally incapable of operating correctly. The first time I bought Quicken it was specifically to create a budget for myself while I was in college…and Quicken promptly started crashing whenever I went to the budget screen, even though everything else worked fine. And now Money has chosen to stop reconciling my accounts. To the extent this may be a problem between chair and keyboard, I dare anyone to venture out into the overwhelming world of Quicken/Money tech support, where the range and severity of problems (data corruption in particular) is downright shocking. There is a reason that Money forces you to backup every time you close the application (can you imagine if, say, Outlook behaved the same way?—”You should now backup your inbox in case Outlook f–’s up and corrupts it while closing — Accept / Postpone”)
I refuse to believe that there isn’t a better system out there. I am not a software developer (professionally, anyway), but personal finance programs SHOULD NOT be so complicated to get right…here’s to hoping Mint is the next generation!
Lovehate,
Your words are our motivation! We had the same problems and wanted something simpler. We are working hard to deliver that to you…
When will the beta be released?
this would be great for me. My husband has quicken OCD and I cannot stand to sit and enter stuff, this has been the material for many marital conflicts. An easier way would be fantastic
This looks really interesting! I just graduated, got my CPA license, but honestly advocating financial literacy seems to be more my calling. It would be great if I can recommend this new web application (actually, I’ve been dreaming of putting one up and it turns out you beat me to it
to fellow young Filipinos.
I tried asking Mvelopes if I could take care of the integration with the local banks here in the Philippines - but it seems they don’t have expansion plans yet. Am I right to expect that I won’t be able to use Mint with my Philippine accounts and online stock brokerage?
ok, it’s July, whatsup? Where’s my beta?
Would like to write some love, but still waiting on product. Is this an experiment to see how long we’ll occupy ourselves with the blog? IS there a product?
Little help here -
Estef,
Of course there’s a product, and it’s coming very soon!
We’ve been keeping the beta invites low in order to really focus on customer feedback - it’s amazing how much you can learn from just 10 in person usability studies. Our goal is to release a product that really blows people away with how easy it is to use, and how effective it is for automating financial management.
Send an email to Noah@mint.com and ask him for priority access…we’re starting to let in larger waves of users.
[...] why we invited Mint founder Aaron Patzer to our office to do a live demo. Then, we each went home and tried to make Mint work as well with [...]