Transcription - Online Finance Software Mint Demo with CEO Aaron
Patzer
June 22th, 2008
Online Finance Software Mint Demo with Aaron Patzer
Hi, I’m Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint.com. Mint.com is a free personal finance web app – it links to all of your checking and savings accounts, all of your credit cards, brokerages, your 401Ks, 529 plans to give you a complete picture of your finances in one place. It’ll show you how much you spend on gas and groceries, it will show you how much you owe, how much you have. It will give you alerts and bill reminders and all sorts of fun stuff.
So I’m going to show you today how to get up and running in less than 5 minutes.
So I’m going to click sign up – Mint sign up is both easy and anonymous, you simply type in an email, zip code and password of your choosing. Mint doesn’t ask for your name, security number or anything that’s personally identifying, so we know all about your finances but not about you. There’s a one time account set up process where Mint will establish a secure link to one of 6500 different financial institutions, you can add your checking accounts, savings, credit cards 401K’s, IRA’s, 529 plans, mortgages, loans, everything you’ve got. So to do that I click here, I’m going to search for my accounts so I’ll search for Chase, then add a Chase credit card, and then I type in the same user name and password that I would to log into Chase.com. Mint establishes a secure connection, downloads my transactions, my balances and my bill due dates, and once this is set up, and it took just a second, you never have to do it again, it will download everything on a nightly basis so you are always in synch and up to date. It will even show you over here who your most popular merchant was, for me its iTunes as of late. You can even add more accounts, so I’ll add Capital One, and I can even abbreviate. While that’s waiting I can add my etrade investments, and even go a step further and add a checking account, you can search by a URL as well so I can type in 53.com for 5th 3rd Bank, etrade, Capital One, Chase they’ve all come through - 5th 3rd will take anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds, and so in under two minutes you’ve linked all your accounts and this is really the only work that you will ever have to do on Mint.
So once you’re done setting up all your accounts you can click over to the overview tab, and get a summary view of all your finances. So you can see how much you have in each of your checking or investment accounts, you can see how much you owe on your credit cards. And if your balances ever drop too low Mint will actually send you an email or a text message alert, in fact you can get alerts for all sorts of things. You can get an alert when your balance drops, you can get an alert for credit card, er, bill being due, when you have low available credit, when you’re over budget when the bank charges you a fee or when your pay check gets deposited. You can get those through email or text message. You can see, at a glance, er, your portfolio movers and shakers – the ones that are doing best and worst. So I can see that Fidelity is doing well for me, Silicone Labs not so much. I can see my budget and how much I have spent so far this month, it’s the very beginning of the month so not a whole of purchases have come across but I can go through and add a quick budget for say, restaurants and what Mint will do is show me how much I’ve been spending in that category, so I can actually see, in green, how much I’ve spent each month on restaurants rather than pulling a budget out of thin air. And then in blue I can see what the US average is, and that let’s me be a little bit comparative, a little bit competitive with my budgets. And if I exceed a budget Mint will email me, I don’t have keep track of it every single day.
If we go over to the spending trends page Mint gives me a nice pie chart break down of all of my expenses, how much I spent on home, and travel, food and dining, shopping –you name it. You can even click into food and dining for more detail, so you’re breakdown of restaurants versus groceries versus fast food versus coffee shop, or one more level and actually see where do I get my groceries from, which restaurants are most popular for me, how many times did I go to Starbucks last month – all the details. You can even see your spending over time to understand if you are spending more or less in any given category. I can keep track of my fast food habit, and actually compare how much I spend versus a bunch of other people in the San Hose area spend on fast food. Or on coffee, or on shoes, or on gas –it’s pretty fun.
If I click over to investments I can see all of my investment accounts, so I can see my IRA, my 401K, my eTrade accounts all in one place. I can actually click in, say on eTrade, and see my individual stocks, or click in on a particular stock and see how much it has been worth over time, so I can see that my Ishares Canada was about $5900 a couples of months back and now it’s up to about $7000 which is great.
If I click over on ways to save Mint shows me not just where my money’s going but how I can do better. So Mint found $644 in savings that are unique to my financial situation, if I click on this Etrade offer it shows me “Hey you’ve got $16,000 in your 5th 3rd checking account, we know you’re not earning any interest, you’re paying all sorts of ATM fees that you shouldn’t be paying, if you move that over to Etrade you’d get more than 3% interest, you’d get free ATM’s, free debit card, free bill pay and you’d make $500 or $538 more a year in interest without really having to do anything more” For credit cards, Mint looks at my individual spending habits and says “Hey, you spend a lot on AT&T Wireless plan, you could get 10% back on that and that would be better than the cash back rewards you currently have”. And it will take into consideration interest rates, fees, balance transfers, all the details. So in about 5 minutes we have shown you how to get set up with Mint, see where all your money goes and find hundreds if not thousands of dollars in savings opportunities.
