Mint.com - Excellent free web-based alternative to Money and Quicken

I've become more interested in managing my personal finances the past few months, since it's become a necessity after taking on an excessively large (for my income level) mortgage payment. I've researched Quicken and Microsoft Money and found they are both reviewed comparably as solid, but not perfect, products. I downloaded the free trial of Microsoft Money and was impressed with its ease of setup; I quickly imported all of my online checking, money market savings, and credit card accounts. The UI was very good and gave me a lot of control over categorizing charges and reviewing spending trends and amounts per category. One particularly troublesome issue that I came across was payments that I made to my credit card were categorized as payments, yet still showed up as expenses - thus throwing off my actual expense totals, trends, etc. I spent a couple of hours Googling the topic and found other people had encountered the same problem, with no simple solution.

I had opened a Mint.com account a few months prior but had only used it briefly before letting it languish, so I decided to give it another shot to see if it also had the same problem. Thankfully it did not, Mint.com was able to properly handle credit card payments and offered a nice, although inferior to Money, user interface. Mint.com was able to import all of my accounts just as easily as Money. It is more time consuming to enter information into Mint.com because of the slower web-based user interface, due to the latency issue but also because it is more difficult to make a web-based UI that is comparable to a fat client. In Money, for instance, I could click on a segment in a pie chart for a spending category and peruse the individual charges easily - Mint.com cannot do this and I have to switch tabs and perform a search to get the same result. Another issue is the alerts, they are incorrectly calculating my spending - summing up the last 3 months of spending and showing alerts that I have exceeded my normal spending amount for the month. For instance, saying I spent $9k on my mortgage payment this month, even though those checks were from the past 3 months combined. This is likely a minor bug and should be simple to correct on their end. The actual dates for the checks being processed are correct... Unit tests anyone?

Mint.com claims they are currently working on adding loans, investments, and mortgages to their list of account types that you can import - this will be amazing, once it is done I really will have a single website to monitor my finances and it shows they are responding to user feedback. I like being able to review my finances from home, work, etc. via the web, that is a huge plus for me. It also means that I don't have to backup anything, like I would have to with Money, but it comes at the cost of entrusting Mint.com to secure my financial data. All of my financial data... In one place. It's a bit scary, but I would hope that security is a top concern being that their entire business will disappear if there is any hint of a security hole. The best part about Mint.com is the price, it is FREE! Despite its shortcomings, I highly recommend Mint and will continue to use it. I believe it has a good business plan and is offering a service that isn't currently being matched by the Money/Quicken fat clients.

Mint.com