Interesting article in today’s WSJ on delaying Social Security and simultaneously withdrawing from both Traditional IRAs and regular taxable accounts simultaneously to fund retirement.
Posts Tagged ‘Cash Flow’
Could some Mint help keep Track of your Green?
Monday, September 8th, 2008One of the biggest challenges some of my clients have is tracking how they spend their money. I have been experimenting with an online service called Mint www.mint.com which claims to do just that.
Mint is a kind of online aggregator. It pulls together information from your online bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, and loans. It then analyzes and categorizes the information for you. It can also send you weekly tracking updates. It also allows you to create a budget or it will attempt to create one for you based on its analysis of your prior spending habits.
Setting it up was very easy. I just entered my login information for each of my accounts. I did spend some time reading Mint’s privacy and security information. You can check them out on Mint’s website.
Mint makes its money by offering you “better deals” on loans, credit cards etc. from it’s sponsors. For me none of these was really a better deal, but Mint has been excellent about not letting its partners bombard my inbox with spam.
Over time the Mint has been doing a better job categorizing my spending. You can correct any classification errors pretty easily and Mint will remember the change going forward.
I also like that Mint provides me with a net worth calculation (excluding real estate). I wouldn’t recommend looking at this too often if the stock market gyrations make you too nervous.
There are other services that provide similar benefits to Mint but after trying about four of them, Mint is the one that provided the best information, and appeared to have the strongest, privacy and security policies.