Author Topic: Mint Investments Tab  (Read 9376 times)

Jags4186

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Mint Investments Tab
« on: June 09, 2014, 10:13:12 AM »
Has anyone looked at the Mint investments tab?

According to it I am grossly underperforming the S&P 500 (to the tune of 6% in the last 6 months) even though all my money is in VTI/VFINX.

Does it not take into account weekly additions?

jpo

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2014, 12:51:00 PM »
I completely ignore it aside from the allocation pie chart. I've heard others tout Personal Capital as a better alternative.

Bourbon

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #2 on: June 09, 2014, 12:53:38 PM »
Has anyone looked at the Mint investments tab?

According to it I am grossly underperforming the S&P 500 (to the tune of 6% in the last 6 months) even though all my money is in VTI/VFINX.

Does it not take into account weekly additions?
Mine does the same thing.  Haven't put enough effort into figuring it out.

FIPurpose

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #3 on: June 09, 2014, 12:59:40 PM »
Just looked up the investment numbers for VFINX:

Dec 2013 - Jun 2014: ~$167 to  ~$180

That's an 8% jump. Add in the fact that any stocks you bought in the middle of that time frame are not going to be apart of the full 8% growth, an averaged out 6% doesn't sound that inconceivable.

If you bought at the highest poin in December: 170 growth is only at 6.34%, so I'm not sure what you mean by underperforming.

Eurotexan

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #4 on: June 09, 2014, 01:13:02 PM »
Mine does too, even before I moved my funds to Vanguard and had this amazing performing fund (35% return over the year I had it) it still said I was underperforming so I ignore it now too!

FIPurpose

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #5 on: June 09, 2014, 02:20:33 PM »
Ahh I see what you were talking about now. Ignore my last comment. I thought you were talking about something completely different.

dragoncar

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #6 on: June 09, 2014, 04:02:11 PM »
Has anyone looked at the Mint investments tab?

According to it I am grossly underperforming the S&P 500 (to the tune of 6% in the last 6 months) even though all my money is in VTI/VFINX.

Does it not take into account weekly additions?

Is it really ALL your money though?  Is Mint including your cash or other assets in it's expected investment returns?

Jags4186

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #7 on: June 09, 2014, 04:32:14 PM »
It's not ALL my money but Mint has a separate section for investments that only has my investment account in it. I have maybe .2% of my investment account in cash. I assume that's what it uses.

I'm not worried about it I just find it odd to have an investment tracker section if it's not truly representative.


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NewStachian

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #8 on: June 09, 2014, 04:57:43 PM »
This made me panic the first time I saw it too. I've got an average 9.5% annualized yield since 2003 and mint has me underperforming the S&P500 by an easy 50-60%. It's either bugged or the S&P annualized return is somewhere close to 18-20%.

Mint is great for budgeting... but not when it comes to tracking investments!

wtjbatman

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #9 on: June 09, 2014, 08:04:57 PM »
You said your money is in both VTI and VFINX. VTI is a total stock market fund, unlike VFINX, which is an S&P 500 fund. The S&P 500 has been kicking ass for a while, and is doing better than the overall market YTD. That could explain why Mint says your portfolio is trailing the S&P 500 by itself.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2014, 08:06:36 PM by wtjbatman »

sol

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #10 on: June 09, 2014, 08:34:11 PM »
Mint's investment tracker has always been bogus.  Totally broken.

rmendpara

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #11 on: June 09, 2014, 08:39:54 PM »
There aren't many resources to understand it very well. They don't explain how the numbers are generated, so it's really impossible to interpret the performance chart.

I'd put my information in personal capital's software as it gives you several interesting points of information regarding fees, asset allocation, concentrations, sectors, styles, etc.

In general, Mint is very good budgeting software, Personal Capital is much better to track/understand your overall investments.

iamlindoro

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #12 on: June 09, 2014, 08:45:47 PM »
Mint's investment tracker has always been bogus.  Totally broken.

Yup.  The Investments tab still shows me the performance of assets I haven't owned in years.  It also doesn't seem to be able to calculate cost basis *at all*, it's way, way off of what my basis actually is on investments which I still hold.

NewStachian

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #13 on: June 10, 2014, 05:31:58 AM »
It's also worth mentioning that mint receives all its information from your brokerage account and nobody really knows how detailed or how complete that data is. It may be doing its best to interpolate returns.

webguy

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #14 on: June 10, 2014, 06:56:16 AM »
I'm pretty sure that the returns it displays aren't annualized. So if you invest 10k on Jan 1 and 10k on June 1 and the market goes up 1% per month then you would have a return of 8%. Even if the market is up by a certain amount YTD it will still depend on when exactly you invested and what the overall return is of all of those investments.

Having said that, I've also noticed a few times where an account is labeled as -98% just because I withdrew or transferred some money, which ends up skewing the actual return which is stated.

I was pretty frustrated with Mint's investment tracking so I opened a free account at Personal Capital (https://www.personalcapital.com/). It's WAAAAAYYYYYYYY better and I'd highly recommend it. It breaks down your portfolio into the asset allocation and is a lot more informative than Mint.

zhelud

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #15 on: June 10, 2014, 08:03:03 AM »
Oh, I'm so glad that it's not just me- I have never been able to make heads or tails of how Mint is rating my investments.

ivyhedge

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Re: Mint Investments Tab
« Reply #16 on: June 10, 2014, 08:24:49 AM »
Mint's investment tracker has always been bogus.  Totally broken.


Absolutely: utterly useless.

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!