

Ask HN: Do you trust Mint.com, or have a preferred finance system? - mey

Personal finances are finally getting complex enough that just checking the balance is no longer really suitable to managing my money.  Multiple accounts, automatic payments, and variable incomes are running rampant.<p>I was looking at Mint.com, but the idea of handing over my credentials to all my financial accounts, plus the privacy concerns has me backing away.  Of course the other option is Quicken, or hacking up my own account management solution.<p>What do you use, would you trust mint.com, any other recommendations?<p>Managing multiple books is a plus.
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minalecs
I tried mint and cancelled, and have moved back to Quickbooks.

1\. People say mint is easy to use, the only easy part is importing all your
information, after that I felt your information got lost in all the ads, yes
those recommendations for new credit cards, savings accounts, checking
accounts are all ads.

2\. I hated the alert system, and really didn't appreciate they would log on
to all my accounts daily, it should of been something they did only when I
allowed or controllable. Why .. I have an email alert through one of my bank
accounts, and could tell every time mint.com logged in and checked my records
(which is daily). Which overall reduced security because it could of been
someone else and I thought it was just Mint.

3\. Allowing a third party logging into any of your personal accounts, without
approval every time, just didn't sit well with me.

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mbrubeck
I use Gnucash (<http://gnucash.org/>) for personal and business accounting.
It's a "serious" double-entry accounting system with a nice UI and good
documentation.

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eklitzke
I personally use mint, and love it. This is for a few reasons:

* the product is really good; it's really easy to use, it connects to just about everything, and the alerts/trends system is great * I really like the alerts system; they've given me tax tips and warned me about upcoming payments that I might have otherwise missed * they seem pretty competent from the security side; they have a fair amount of material on their site covering this (e.g. <http://www.mint.com/privacy/security-tech/>)

Obviously mint has a huge incentive to have really strong security; since they
have so much of your data they have to comply with stringent security
regulations in order to just operate their business, and if mint were to be
compromised it would be a huge blow to them. If you think about it, they have
a lot more riding on their security than your bank does!

I can understand why other people don't want to give their credentials to
mint, but the quality of the product and the fact that they seem pretty
clueful makes me not really worry about it.

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siegler
Yodlee is highly regarded and has been around longer than Mint. Their primary
business is running back end services for banks and financial institutions
(Bank of America, Scottrade, E*trade) while offering the personal service for
free. They have forums to get more info <http://forum.yodlee.com>
<https://moneycenter.yodlee.com>

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justinchen
Doesn't Mint just use Yodlee on the backend?

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scorchin
I've been using <http://www.wesabe.com> for a lot longer than I've known about
mint.com

The main reason being that it supported UK banks, while mint.com was turning
me away!

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cydork
I don't and won't trust anyone with my credentials. Also there is wesabe.com
which allows user to upload the transaction data using a desktop application
or Firefox extension. Thought it is still in beta.

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byoung2
I'm sure you trust your bank with your credentials. They're just as likely as
Mint.com to be hacked.

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mapleoin
but trusting your bank AND mint with your credentials doubles that risk.

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projectileboy
I _love_ buxfer.com. One of the things I love about it is that you can choose
to keep your credentials local if you choose to.

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aresant
Mint's uses standardized Apis that allow for balance inquries, transaction
overviews, etc but NOT to transfer money. They encrypt login details so even
if their db gets hacked your exposure is minimal.

In other words I feel comfortable with recommending the platform.

