Hello Mint Readers
I’m Lee Sherman, Editor of Mint’s blog. As the newest face of Mint, I wanted to take a minute to say hi.
Just as Mint’s software streamlines the management of your personal finances, our content delivers a fresh perspective that gives you the actionable advice you need to make the right choices about how to spend and save your money.
We understand that the challenges you face are different from your parent’s generation and your expectations about how you live, work, and play are different too. If you’re just getting started in managing your money, look to Mint.com for how-to information on everything from planning a budget vacation to improving your credit rating. We’ll continue to provide you with money saving tips on all of the things you do, whether that’s buying concert tickets or going on a surfing trip to South Africa. We’ll also be covering topics that you won’t find on other personal finance sites. For now, those will remain our little secret.
And we can’t do it without you. Our hope is that the Mint blog becomes a two-way forum for your thoughts, hopes and aspirations around the money you work so hard for every day. We encourage you to reinvest—not just in stocks or mutual funds but also in your relationship with your money. Just like in your personal relationships, a small investment can pay huge dividends. As we like to say around here, “money is for living,” and that philosophy is at the heart of every blog post we write.
Let us know what kinds of articles you’d like to see on Mint, either by leaving a comment here or writing me directly at lee@mint.com. A penny for your thoughts?
Lee
Organize your financial life.
Use Mint.com to see where your money goes, get bill reminders & alerts, track your investment performance, and find extra savings. It’s FREE! More
Welcome, Lee
Give me a hard example (numbers, accounts, companies to use and all) of what I can do as a young person (early 20’s) to retire very comfortably.
my favorite tips are ones where Mint is shown to enhance or enable a principle of personal finance.
Lee,
Welcome to the Mint family! I am a very enthusiastic user of Mint, and I look forward to seeing the sustainable growth of a business, and a web application. In ways, I have seen Mint, through its comparison tools, become a social application- I am keenly interested in maximizing type of route, without disrupting the (potential) user base.
With that said, the most sought after feature for myself would be an iPhone Mint application. Additionally, I would like to see more control over email or SMS alerts.
I have also provided some feedback on the Facebook page. In short, my idea was to provide some sort of contextual financial advice based on your spending. For example, if I was spending 20% of my income on Auto expenses- it would give me some advice on how to reduce it- possible with help from your “partner” organizations.
Again, welcome! Keep up the awesome work!
I’d like to know what website or service to use to start investing in stocks/bonds etc.
There are so many out there. I just don’t trust the pitch on etrade.com etc.
Thanks in advance.
Welcome! Sounds like you have some exciting ideas!
Personally I’d like to see something on how to make it financially feasible to pay student loan debt while moving and working abroad for a year. My dream is to move to Europe or SA for a year and work there, but I obviously have to pay bills while I’m gone too. I think it’s doable but would love to hear some input from others or an article about it. 
It’d also be cool to see you work with Tim Ferriss and discuss his ideas on the Four Hour Work Week and mini retirements versus a final retirement.
I’d like to see a dashboard of new features/bug fixes so that users can have insight into what’s coming next for mint! For example, when will mint add support for tracking Rewards programs and Airline Miles? If I knew that this was in the works, I’d be less likely to stay.
I can even imagine allowing users to vote on which features they’d like to see next. That would be amazing.
So, financial advice is cool, but how about transparency into the development process?
Your sitemap is broken.
http://www.mint.com/sitemap/
Your “thank you” to feedback is broken.
http://mint.com/thankyou.html
These errors I found in just five minutes on your site. Yet you would like us to assume that we should trust you with access to our financial accounts? I don’t think so. Mint is not ready for that responsibility.
@Aron - Thanks for your comment. We re-launched our public site last week, and are still updating the sitemap. We neglected to remove the link from the footer, however, so thanks for pointing this out.
I can assure you that the Mint product is entirely secure. For more details on this, please see http://www.mint.com/privacy/
@Amy, thanks so much for your comment. I think you’ll be pleased with a couple of articles we have coming up, one on “Selling Yourself Overseas” and a pair of articles on how to deal with Student Loans. I like your idea about the Four Hour Work Week and will definitely pursue it. Keep ‘em coming.
Ignorant question. I am considering signing up. How does this system track my “cash” spending (such as $15.78 for lunch, $10 for lottery tickets etc) Is there a place to manually enter this ?
Thank you in advance
I am looking how to pay student loans while living at home with parents, sleeping on the couch, helping out with their mortgage, and enjoying life at the same time! I love this product, its helped immensely!
I nominated you for the “I heart your blog” award…
http://www.financeurlife.com/2008/09/blog-love.html
The lack of categories on Mint drive me crazy. There are so few of them and don’t really satisfy the needs of the transactions. How do I category payments to Home Equity Loan payments? Dues for work?
Other work expenses?
Hi,
I am an avid user of your website. I believe this is one of the better financial planning solutions out there. There is probably not a bigger evangelist (well outside of your company) for your solution that I. I have got quite a few of my friends signed up, after I told them of all the benefits I am deriving from this site. I use it often and I love it.
Besides the kudos, I have a bunch of product enhancement suggestions. I am Product Manager at a technology company and I believe that are several areas where there usability could be enhanced and several new features that could be added that would make this website more productive. What is the best manner to let these be known to the Mint team.
Keep up the good work
@Gordon - We will be adding an extended category structure, as well as support for custom categories, in the next release. Thanks for your patience!
You should have checklists you can download and print out when you are making financial decisions like:
1) You’re opening a savings account how should you compare based on Rates, CD terms, FDIC insurance, etc.
2) Getting a credit card, a checklist to choose between rewards, interest rates etc.
3) Places in your zip code you can find the cheapest gas, best interest rates on a checking or savings account, lowest mortgage rate and stuff like that.
4) Healthy ways to save money like quitting smoking, exercising and healthy stuff to eat thats cheaper than expensive junk food.
5) Energy savings tips that will free up cash in your budget for savings like replacing light bulbs, using appliances at night and tricks to save water and gasoline. What’s the return on investment for fluorescent light bulbs or unplugging your big screen tv when you’re not using it?
Dear Mint,
I can’t seem to find anyone answering the question about cash accounts. Cash represents say 30% of my spending. How can I possibly not have a way to track this? How can this be a complete application without this functionality? Is it on the roadmap? This is the only reason why I would not switch.
Mark,
The way I manage my cash account is to track it with the ATM withdrawal that i have (I get my cash at ATM’s). What you can do is to split your ATM withdrawal expense into the actual expenses that you incurred with cash. So if you withdrew $60 and spent 20 on dinner, 15 on a book and 35 for a cab, you go to the ATM withdrawal of 60 and split it into three expenses of the 20,15,and 35.