Review: Mint.com

Summary
Mint.com is a website for managing your bank accounts, loans, and retirement funds. For the deeply paranoid, it's a conspiracy to gather all of your banking information that is already available online in another place online.

It starts when you notice their cool green color and refreshing taste.
(Photo: stankuns at Flickr)

Review
Mint.com is relatively new (since 2006), yet amazingly popular.

As I see it the main benefits of Mint.com are:

• Transactions - All your transactions across all your accounts (almost; some banks aren't supported). This includes things like your checking, savings, CDs, credit cards, loans, and retirement accounts. It's nice to be able to see them all together and categorize them appropriately.
• Graphs - Being able to easily make visual representations of your spending or the trends of your retirement account is nice.
• Notifications - Mint can notify you about certain important financial moments. For example, they can notify you
  • if your spending seems anomalous (this takes a few months to adjust),
  • when a large purchase clears, or
  • when you are near your credit limit.

Some downsides:

• Small Banks - Even though many institutions are supported, some smaller (e.g., local banks) are not, and there's no way to manually import your data. (Although, they say it's coming "mid-march.")
• Privacy - Mint has a strong privacy policy and many implicitly trust its security model. Nonetheless, it's a little strange to trust one entity with all of your transaction history (*Cough* Google).

On balance, Mint helps people who are interested in their spending habits get a larger picture of their income & expenses.

See Also

• MintLife Blog for personal finance articles that occasionally feature high quality infographics.
• Mint.com at Wikipedia for some other information.
• Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? at TechCrunch for a discussion about Blippy-- a twitter-like site that tells everyone what you're buying.

Review: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

(Photo: Amazon)

Review
Ramit Sethi (that I guy I quote a lot), author of the website IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, published a book by the same name about personal finance for twentysomethings.

Although I knew the book would not differ much from the content available on his website, it was pleasant to have Ramit's thoughts presented in close proximity to each other rather than spread out across the years I've been following his blog.

Most of his advice revolves around a single theme: stop loosing money by doing nothing. It occurred to me that while in the world of economics, such appeals to opportunity cost are customary, the world of twentysomethings would much rather feel guilty about doing nothing rather than actually figuring out what needs to be done and doing it. (Please pardon the gross oversimplifications; there are many responsible twenty year-olds, but few who think they can do anything about their finances.)

The blog contains much, if not all, of the advice in the book, but the book highlighted three things I had failed to implement (though I read them on the blog). First, I finally took Ramit's advice about negotiation, and negotiated a bill. I clearly have more work to do in that department, but it was good to have a plan of how to approach the conversation, and not feel weird about talking about money. To Ramit's credit, he portrays negotiation as asymmetric warfare: you, a novice in negotiation, are battling with experts who negotiate with people every day. However, you needn't become a Spartan to negotiate effectively. In fact, being pleasant (and smiling) makes it even easier. Negotiation is a fascinating phenomenon in the world of human interaction; it has elements of conflict, optimization and compromise. Each party seeks to optimize results that favor him or her, yet done right both parties can win. A critical part of Ramit's advise is to avoid yes-or-no questions when you really want to ask "how can we make this work?" That one question saved me $180 (over six months) for 2 minutes worth of effort.

The next piece of advise I had failed to implement was to synchronize your bills with your paycheck (to the extent possible). The idea is to have a more predictable and automated flow of money. While I've got much of the flow nailed down, I never thought to change the billing date to a common date; we'll see how this works out over the coming months and years.

Lastly, the book provided a clearer perspective on what it takes to buy a house. Again, this isn't anything that Ramit hadn't said previously about buying a house. It was just easier to focus on his points when I was reading a book (about finance!) rather than reading my daily blogs. The only change in behavior this created was creating a little "dashboard" for important goals. Previously the goals were general (house, travel, etc.); now they are very specific (20% down payment, trip to California, etc.). This small change forced me to also estimate the cost and, by extension, the date of fulfillment of each of the goals. Again, the payoff is mostly psychological, but it helps take down some psychological barriers.

Overall, I recommend this book to most people as an example of how to set up an automatic system that helps alleviate certain kinds of stress. It's an excellent short read and his good humored presentation doesn't hurt either.