Mint vs Excel

[OneDollarAtATime]

Hi,

I know there are a bunch of Mint topics in the MMM forums, but I can't seem to find one that explains the pros / cons of using Mint vs using Excel.

My fiance and I are going to join accounts so all the income goes into one account, then kicks out some spending money for her.  She used to be massively in CC debt, student loans, etc. and, since I've met her, has done a great job of clawing out of debt, breaking her 'materialistic' habits (clothes and other crap) and getting her finances under control.  I'm proud of her progress. 

She's also taking the 'leap' of allowing me to manage our finances.  Instead of her feeling like 'this is boring, I get my $x per month to spend and that's all I'm working for' I want her to be able to see where our money is going, where we can save more and how much our savings are building as a result of her efforts.

Right now, I track my budget in Excel.  I also built a simple spreadsheet for her (which has come in handy MANY times when she didn't realize how her spending 'now' might put her budget underwater later).  With joint accounts, I want something that's more user-friendly that she can visually see the progress of and track where our money is going - not just follow numbers on a boring spreadsheet.

My concern is the safety of Mint.com -- is it worth the risk of putting our finances online?  Is Mint.com fairly well protected?  Have there been prior 'hacks'?  What types of info would the hackers be getting (social security numbers, or just bank numbers?)  Are there other 'risks' that come into play?

I'm also open to other options, should any MMM folk feel there's a better approach for this.

[Philociraptor]

Nobody can decide on your personal risk tolerance but you. In the 4 years I've been using Mint, I haven't heard of any hacks. If there were an extremely successful hack, your bank login information could potentially be compromised, which is definitely a problem if you use the same email/password for everything. I personally use Mint because I'm lazy and it automatically imports all transactions for me, since all spending is done on credit cards. Since I manage all the finances in the relationship, I also like that I can give my wife the login information and she can look and see our current balances, budgets, and investments anytime on her phone.

[HAPPYINAZ]

I have used both and found that I lost interest in Mint but am completely dedicated to my excel spreadsheet.  Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly why I backed off of using Mint.  I use Quicken to track expenses in detail by importing my credit card charges and bank accounts.  But I use excel to track all my stock purchases, stock account balances and my net worth (not including the house).  You can create graphs in excel that show growth of your net worth and it automatically will update as you enter things over time.  The graphs are what I share with my husband when I want to update him on our finances.  In addition I have created a section in the spreadsheet that shows how my 'stache should have grown over time at varying percent returns.  So I have a column for year, then rows for percent return for 5%, 10%, 12%, 15%, 20%.  I use the same starting value and then run the calculations out for the next 15 years for each return percentage.  Then at the end of the year I compare where I am to which percentage that amounts to.  It makes me happy to see my percent return climbing from one row to the next.   

attached are some graphs from my spreadsheet.  You can get as simple or fancy as you want with graphs.  You can select data for the graph that includes unused data cells that will fill in as time goes on so that you graph updates each time you update the data.


Perhaps your best choice of action is to try both methods and see which you like better.  The one you want to use is the one that you will be committed to using.  If you worry about your data in mint and therefore don't update it often, perhaps the spreadsheet is best for you.  Personally I love how versatile excel is.  I can have so much information on one sheet and mix data and graphs.  I can also change it over time so I am calculating new things, like avg monthly net worth gain that another member here suggested.  I also have rows for my gross income, taxable income, year over year increases, dividend income, interest income, etc.

[HAPPYINAZ]

Oh and seeing this graph of how my 'stache would grow over the years with different percent returns (5 to 15%) made an impact on me by trying to push us to higher returns (by saving more or by getting better returns on investments or by earning more income).

[AlanStache]

Mint works well if your finances are typical.  I stopped using it because it was to much work to separate out work travel expenses/reimbursements from actual personal income/spending as well as some other odd things I have going on.  Also I found doing a costco run every three weeks did not fit well into there monthly budget template, I would double up trips some months but be under in others.  It is much less work than custom excel sheets and is probably less able to be manipulated by you so more trust-able by your gf.  Over all Mint is good if you can work within its standardized structure.  Mint is also easy to setup and cancel, maybe you should create an account to poke around and see if you like it?

Would you consider switching to google docs rather than proper Excel, you loose a few features but you & your gf can book mark it in chrome and view/edit it from any web contented computer.  I am very happy with it for my running logs and investment tracking.

[turketron]

relevant existing thread about Mint here: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/ask-a-mustachian/how-secure-is-mint/

I myself use Mint and am not particularly concerned about the security. One of the features of my primary bank (Capital One 360) offers is a read-only Access Code that is specifically intended to be used with sites like Mint. Instead of giving your regular login and password, you give Mint the Access Code instead, which only allows Mint to download transaction data. Even if someone were to hack your Mint account, they'd only have access to view your purchase history. I do have other credit cards hooked up to Mint that don't have the read-only code but I'm not as worried about those since they're not direct checking/savings accounts.