Should I use Mint.com?  Is it secure / trusted? [duplicate]
Yes, there is such possibility. Also, there's a possibility people made your computer, your operation system, your browser, etc. put there some code there that would intercept your communications and steal your money. So could bank clerks (and unlike all other examples, this really happened in real world, numerous times, though usually at smaller banks), ATM makers, etc.  In the modern world, you rely on things made by thousands of people, this is a part of modern world's conveniences. You don't have to use it - you can store all your money in a big jar in your basement and nobody but occasional thief breaking in could take it.  However, fraudulent unauthorized transactions in most banks can be rolled back, and any transaction is reported to you. So fraud from mint.com people would be quite low on my list of risks. Much bigger risk is that somebody could break into mint.com servers and steal information about your accounts from there or install some malicious code. I believe they have good protections, but no security system is perfect. You need to evaluate how the convenience of using mint.com compares to your personal feeling about this risk. If you feel you couldn't sleep at night knowing somewhere out there there is information about your money - don't use it. I don't worry about it too much as I know the chance of it happening is low and the chance of getting the money back if it happens is high, but if you feel differently - don't do it. So could someone working at your bank directly.  Of at your HR department at work.  Most of the wait staff at the restaurant I ate at technically had access to my credit card and could steal money.  While you are at work, someone could break into your house and steal your stuff too. The point is, Mint and everything else is a matter of the evaluating the risk.  Since you already understand the vulnerability (they have your accounts) and you know the risk (they could steal your money) what are the chances it happens? 1.)  Mint will make lots more money if it doesn't happen, so it benefits Intuit to pay their employees well and put in safeguards to prevent theft.  Mint.com is on your side even if a specific employee isn't. 2.)  You have statements and such, so you can independently evaluate mint.  I do not just trust mint with my stuff, I check info in Quicken and at the bank sites themselves.  I don't do them all equally, but I will catch problems. 3.)  Laws mean that if theft happens, you will have the opportunity to be made whole. If you are worried about theft, don't trust other people or generally get a bad feeling, don't do it.  If you check your accounts online with the same computer you log into Facebook with, them I would suggest it doesn't bother you.  You might have legal or business reasons to be more adverse to risk then me. However, just because somebody could steal your money, I personally don't consider it an acceptable risk compared to the reward. I will also be one of the first people to be robbed, I am not unrealistic.
"I have to disagree with Scott's point about bank's ability to reimburse you for money withdrawn by people who stole your debit-card - that is only limited to transactions taken place after you reported the lost of the card (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre04.shtm).  In the event that someone got into your banking account and conduct transactions without your knowledge, you are pretty screwed unless you can prove it wasn't you who did the transaction.  The same goes for people whose debit card was ""copied"" (e.g. by swiping through those hacked ATM) - the bank's insurance policy doesn't kick in until you report loss. Mint.com is very nice website and too bad it doesn't work for Canadians.  I instead opt'd for Yodlee (moneycenter.yodlee.com) which is the engine behind Mint but works for Canadians (but without all the social network aspects/features).  These sites are good for aggregating your various personal financial info online, but none of them are good enough (yet) for me to ditch my Microsoft Money - oh wait, MS has decided to discontinue the product and I need to look another one... Chris" It serves its purpose.   I have an account there, but transferred most of the funds in it to an American Express account a while back.  The primary reason was that, unlike ING, AE actively worked with Mint. I second the vote for GnuCash. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is double-entry accounting, so there is a little bit of a learning curve, but it sounds like you should probably have something a little more powerful than Mint for your situation. "Microsoft still supports XP with security updates for large enterprise companies that are willing to pony up a few million for the support contracts because it's cheaper than upgrading existing infrastructure.  I know at least 2 of the banks I've worked with are currently paying for extended XP support (although ironically, my understanding is that they're paying for desktop support so they have more time to migrate business critical legacy apps, rather than anything related to deployed ATM infrastructure)  Most ATMs aren't ""online"" in any form that most people would associate with the internet.    AFAIK most of the hacks against ATMs that don't require physical access are for stand-alone or retail based machines (Think of the unbranded ATMs you see in gas stations or stores that only take cash).  Although if anyone happens to have details on a Major bank ATM exploit, I'd love to see the details." "Quicken. I am in the same situation. I've tried mint.com and switched back to Quicken because i want to know how much money i'll have in my accounts in 2 weeks, 4 weeks, etc.  I have to admit though, quicken is getting worse and worse every year. Can't really say i ""recommend"" it." "I'm a big fan of Mint. I tried Wesabe prior to mint and at the time (about a year ago) it was lacking the integration of many of my accounts, so I had to go with Mint by necessity. Since then, Mint has gotten better almost monthly. I can do almost everything I want, and the budgeting tools (which would address your ""6 months out"" forecast desires) and deal alerts (basically tells you if you can get a better interest rate on savings/credit card/etc) are really helpful. Highly recommended!" You could keep an eye on BankSimple perhaps? I think it looks interesting at least... too bad I don't live in the US... They are planning to create an API where you can do everything you can do normally. So when that is released you could probably create your own command-line interface :) Money Dashboard and Love Money look like two best options out there now that Kublax closed their doors. Mint were making noises last year about spreading to UK/Canada, but I've not heard anything new about that. I like using Mint.com to track my expenses.  It makes it very easy to watch my budget and monitor my spending. Here's my approach: As for Google Docs, I think that its safe enough for most people. If you in a profession that was subject to heavy regulatory scrutiny, of if you are cheating on your taxes, I would probably not use a cloud provider. Many providers will provide documents to government agencies without a subpoena or notice to you. The short answer is that there are no great personal finance programs out there any more. In the past, I found Microsoft Money to be slick and feature rich but unfortunately it has been discontinued a few years ago.  Your choices now are Quicken and Mint along with the several open-source programs that have been listed by others. In the past, I found the open source programs to be both clunky and not feature-complete for my every day use. It's possible they have improved significantly since I had last looked at them. The biggest limitation I saw with them is weakness of integration with financial service providers (banks, credit card companies, brokerage accounts, etc.) Let's start with Mint. Mint is a web-based tool (owned by the same company as Quicken) whose main feature is its ability to connect to nearly every financial institution you're likely to use. Mint aggregates that data for you and presents it on the homepage. This makes it very easy to see your net worth and changes to it over time, spending trends, track your progress on budgets and long-term goals, etc. Mint allows you to do all of this with little or no data entry. It has support for your investments but does not allow for deep analysis of them. Quicken is a desktop program. It is extremely feature rich in terms of supporting different types of accounts, transactions, reports, reconciliation, etc. One could use Quicken to do everything that I just described about Mint, but the power of Quicken is in its more manual features. For example, while Mint is centred on showing you your status, Quicken allows you to enter transactions in real-time (as you're writing a check, initiating a transfer, etc) and later reconciles them with data from your financial institutions. Link Mint, Quicken has good integration with financial companies so you can generally get away with as little or as much data entry as you want. For example, you can manually enter large checks and transfers (and later match to automatically-downloaded data) but allow small entries like credit card purchases to download automatically.  Bottom line, if you're just looking to keep track of where you are at, try Mint. It's very simple and free. If you need more power and want to manage your finances on a more transactional level, try Quicken (though I believe they do not have a trial version, I don't understand why). The learning curve is steep although probably gentler than that of GnuCash. Last note on why Mint.com is free: it's the usual ad-supported model, plus Mint sells aggregated consumer behaviour reports to other institutions (since Mint has everyone's transactions, it can identify consumer trends). If you're not comfortable with that, or with the idea of giving a website passwords to all your financial accounts, you will find Quicken easier to accept. Hope this helps. "Mint.com uses something called OFX (Open Financial Exchange) to get the information in your bank account. If someone accessed your mint account they would not be able to perform any transactions with your bank. All they would be able to do is view the same information you do, which some of it could be personal <- that's up to you. Generally the weakest point in security is with the user. An ""attacker"" is far more likely to get your account information from you then he is from the site your registered with.  Why you're the weakest point: When you enter your account information, your password is never saved exactly how you enter it. It's passed through what is called a ""one way function"", these functions are easy to compute one way but given the end-result is EXTREMELY difficult to compute in reverse. So in a database if someone looked up your password they would see it something like this ""31435008693ce6976f45dedc5532e2c1"". When you log in to an account your password is sent through this function and then the result is checked against what is saved in the database, if they match you are granted access. The way an attacker would go about getting your password is by entering values into the function and checking the values against yours, this is known as a brute force attack. For our example (31435008693ce6976f45dedc5532e2c1) it would take someone 5 million years to decry-pt using a basic brute force attack. I used ""thisismypassword"" as my example password, it's 12 characters long. This is why most sites urge you to create long passwords with a mix of numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. This is a very basic explanation of security and both sides have better tools then the one explained but this gives you an idea of how security works for sites like these. You're far more likely to get a virus or a key logger steal your information. I do use Mint. Edit: From the Mint FAQ: Do you store my bank login information on your servers?   Your bank login credentials are stored securely in a separate database   using multi-layered hardware and software encryption. We only store the   information needed to save you the trouble of updating, syncing or   uploading financial information manually. Edit 2:  From OFX About Security Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a unified specification for the   electronic exchange of financial data between financial institutions,   businesses and consumers via the Internet. This is how mint is able to communicate with even your small local bank. FINAL EDIT: ( This answers everything )  For passwords to Mint itself, we compute a secure hash of the user's   chosen password and store only the hash (the hash is also salted - see   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal... ).  Hashing is a one-way function   and cannot be reversed.   It is not possible to ever see or recover   the password itself.  When the user tries to login, we compute the   hash of the password they are attempting to use and compare it to the   hashed value on record. (This is a standard technique which every site   should use). For banking credentials, we generally must use reversible encryption   for which we have special procedures and secure hardware kept in our   secure and guarded datacenter.  The decryption keys never leave the   hardware device (which is built to destroy the key material if the   tamper protection is attacked).  This device will only decrypt after   it is activated by a quorum of other keys, each of which is stored on   a smartcard and also encrypted by a password known to only one person.   Furthermore the device requires a time-limited   cryptographically-signed permission token for each decryption. The   system (which I designed and patented) also has facilities for secure   remote auditing of each decryption. Source: David K Michaels, VP Engineering, Mint.com - http://www.quora.com/How-do-mint-com-and-similar-websites-avoid-storing-passwords-in-plain-text" I like to put money I am going to spend in my Quicken register (similar to Money in my limited experience) and that is the big ticket feature missing from mint.com.  Mint.com can only tell you what you did, or in a very general sense what you plan to do. As a register, mint.com is flexible enough for me to categorize my transactions.  As a planning / budgeting tool mint.com is very simple and fast to get going, but lacks the depth of a budget I want to manage every week.  Mint.com also tracks my investments, but I freely admit my investment management is nothing more than putting money into the same accounts.  I bother with investment tracking other than looking to see it isn't zero. I say try mint.com.  Mint.com has a place to totally delete your account. "I think a lot of people would respond with something like ""you use bank machines and online banking, don't you?""  That is the same reason I hear people supporting voting machines and even online voting, but the problem is that there are significant differences. Take a service like mint.com compared with your bank for example.  The bank is a regulated company with insurance to back up your money should they make a mistake.  Even if someone steals your debit card and drains your account, you will usually get all your money back.  Banks have deep pockets and even the government has a vested interest in making sure the banks stay afloat.  When they do make a mistake (and they will) you are usually quite safe. On the other hand, mint.com is a third party that you are just going to hand over your bank passwords to.  I think it is reasonable to ask: I am not saying not to use mint.com, but it is certainly reasonable to ask these questions." "You are doing Great! But you might want to read a couple of books and do some studying on budgeting and personal finance - education yourself now and you will avoid pain in the future. I learned a lot from reading Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, and I have found some great advice from the simple budgeting guidelines on LearnVest. Budget in these three categories with these percentages, You may find that your ""essentials"" lower than 50%, because you are sharing room and utilities. You want to put as much into ""financial"" as you can for the first 1-2 years, to reduce (or eliminate) your student loan debt. Many folks will recommend you save six months (salary/expenses) for emergencies and unexpected situations. But understand that you are in debt now, and you have a unique opportunity to pay off your debt before your living expenses creep up (as they so often do). Since you are a contractor, put aside 2 months expenses (twice what I would normally advise), and then attack paying off your debts with passion. Since you have a mix of student loans, focus on paying them off by picking one at a time, paying the minimum against the others while you pay off the one you picked, then proceed to the next. Dave Ramsey advises a Debt Snowball, paying the smallest one first (psychological advantage, early wins), while others advise paying the highest interest off first. Since you have over $2400/month available to pay down debt, you could plan on reducing your student loan debt substantially in a year.  But avoid accumulating other debt along the way. Save for larger purchases. Your bedroom purchase may have been premature, but you needed some basics. But check your contract. Since many 0% furniture loan deals retroactively charge interest if you don't pay them off in full - you might want to make regular payments, and pay the debt off a month early (avoid any 'gotcha's). You might want to open a retirement account - many folks recommend a Roth account for folks your age - it is after tax, but you don't pay tax when you withdraw money. Roth is better when you have lots of deductions (think mortgage, kids). But some retirement account would be great to get started. Open a credit union account (if you can), that will make getting a credit card or personal loan (installment) easier. You want to build a credit file, but you don't want credit card debt (seems contradictory), so opening 2 credit cards over the next year will help your credit. You want a good credit mix (student loans, revolving, installment, and mortgage - wait on that one)."