I will share here what I went through deciding whether to go with Mint or Personal Capital. And why do I even keep one of them…
Mint is a free web-based personal finance service that allows you to add all your accounts (bank, credit cards, mortgages) to be able to see and analyze all in the same place.
Personal Capital is similar but seems to put more emphasis on the wealth management side of things.
A short Mint story
I had a Mint account for about two years between four and six years ago and I liked it first: I set up all my accounts (bank, retirement, credit cards, properties, investing) and every week went back to categorize my expenses. My goal at the time was to use it not for budgeting but to find out where the money was going. I am not a big believer in budgeting but I do believe in analyzing data so I wanted to do some after-the-fact “research”. Then two years into it they changed some options (don’t recall the whole details) which caused some of my categorizations to get messed up, I messaged them asking for questions and pretty much got a “that’s how things are now” which is something these types of tech companies tend to do. I got angry and closed the account without further thought.
I was also a bit concerned about having ALL my financials saved into a site, I wondered “what if someone hacks them?” it would be like getting all your accounts hacked!. Later on, I learned that the connections are supposed to be “read-only” so you can’t transfer or withdraw anything, you can only see what’s there. But I think just facilitating someone to see all details of your accounts and expenses feels a bit creepy, but anyways…
There is even a “dummies” book for Mint:
To be honest, in two years I never found the time to do the so-called analysis I was always “about to do” so closing the account really flushed down the drain all the time I had spent with those detailed categorizations. But, I have saved even more time than I would have spent doing the same in the last few years since I closed it.
And a short Personal Capital story
In the year between the time I quit my job and the time I started this blog, I read a lot of rave reviews about PC. All bloggers seemed to love PC. So I decided to give it a try. It is cool. Very similar to Mint, as I said. But I really don’t look at it much. Nowadays my credit card offers very similar analytics capabilities and, since I pretty much only spend from that one credit card, the integration of all my other accounts doesn’t offer much new.
Oh, and about the other investment accounts (brokerage and retirement) I have a Google sheet in my Drive that I bookmarked in Chrome with the details of the stocks I own, and using the =googlefinance() function I can get all the information I want to see without needing to log in to any accounts. You could say I’ve built my own Mint or PC.
Over time I’ve come to believe those bloggers recommend PC because PC has a very generous affiliate program (Mint doesn’t as far as I know) that I think pays $100 if someone you send signs up and has assets over $100,000… So I signed up for the affiliate program myself! Haha. So I can’t really judge them. In any case, I haven’t gotten any revenue from PC yet.
What I do get, I’m going to guess, twice a year is a call from one of their advisors telling me that I really need their advice. This may be true, but “I prefer to be by myself“. So, every time I politely pass and it only takes me a couple of minutes.
Which one would I recommend? Mint or Personal Capital?
Well, I haven’t closed my Personal Capital account yet so I guess you can try it with my invitation code and get $20 for each of us.
Thanks for reading!
Which one do you use?
Things that I use, like, and am affiliated with:
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Personal Capital is a free online financial tool that allows you to see all your money-related accounts and analyze allocation, performance, risk, fees, etc and decide and plan accordingly. Get $20 for opening an account with the link
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