You Could Use a Mint, Part II

I started adding accounts and checking out the different features.  Adding accounts is fairly simple, similar to logging into a credit card website.  Some accounts are easier to add than others, though.  Our primary bank took less than 30 seconds, while the servicer of most of our student loans can't seem to connect correctly.

The expense tracking and budgeting tools are the first features I noticed.  Mint pulls the transaction data from our checking and credit card accounts.  It then assigns categories to most of those transactions (food, restaurants, gas, student loans, etc.), and I have to assign the category to some transactions (it doesn't know that big paper check transaction every month is the rent).

It uses this data to build pie charts of where we are spending our money.  We can also build budgets, which is useful for tracking our going-out-to-eat budget.  For a broader view, it can give you Net Income numbers for every month; so you know when you are living in the black or the red.  In the long run, the Net Worth number will also be good to track, but right now it's just depressing.

At the moment, I feel like Mint is a better connected and cleaner version of Quicken.