FiLife

It figures. Just as I’m packing for Rome, the dollar hits a new all-time low against the euro.

I’ve put off traveling overseas for several years in hopes that the dollar would eventually firm up. But when you start reading stories about how some New York shopkeepers are beginning to favor the European currency, you lose hope. And you just go anyway.

Since we’re already starting at a disadvantage, I want to avoid as many of the fees banks and credit-card companies tack on every time you make a transaction in a foreign currency. So I did some research to find out the best credit-cards to use, as well as what’s the most economic way to convert my weakling dollars into euros (I need a small pile of euros to qualify for a 10% discount on my hotel). (more…)

As we all indulge in collective gift lust over the next few weeks, making lists of things we’d like from relatives and updating our Amazon registries, we thought it would be fun to set up wish lists for our financial-services providers too.

So for the next four Wednesdays, we’ll draw up lists of fees that shouldn’t exist, features that should but don’t yet and other things that inspire delight and disgust.

We kick it off today with a handful of requests for the credit-card issuers in our lives: (more…)

Earlier this week, Ezra Mound, FiLife’s systems administrator and resident security expert, sent a few questions to Mint founder Aaron Patzer about how Mint keeps user data safe (click here and scroll down to see our series of posts on Mint’s tool).

Here are Ezra’s (abbreviated) questions with Aaron’s (unabbreviated) answers: (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 50
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 30%
Shopping for Better Deals Right Now? Just finished, actually (due to the good influence of my FiLife colleagues)

I’m a nut for tools that make me feel like I have my act together. As a senior in college tracking my spending carefully, I try to use my credit and debit cards for everything I can. But I do hit up the local ATM a fair amount. When I heard about Mint, I was skeptical. (Click here for our first post on Mint, which describes it a bit more).

Is this site really going to save my pockets from financial demons? (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 90
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 59%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? Yes

Mint would be great if it worked. I’m not being snide here. I was totally wowed when they came to our offices and demoed the site, but my experience was a bit different.

(more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 50
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 34%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? Always open to possibilities

Unlike Irina, my husband and I charge pretty much everything we can (and pay it off in full each month).

It’s worth noting, however, that if you aren’t set up for online access to your credit or debit-card accounts, you’ll need to do that with all of the card companies before starting in with Mint. That’s because Mint needs your usernames and passwords to access your account. Handing these over made me nervous – another FiLifer will be addressing Mint’s security in detail in a day or two.

Setting up online access to a handful of our accounts took about 15 minutes. What followed, however, really tested my patience. (more…)

Debit and Credit-Card Purchases Per Month: About 20
The Percentage Mint Tagged Incorrectly or Incompletely: 35%
Shopping For Better Deals Right Now? No

The most enticing thing for me about Mint was the promise that it could tell me how much I spend on what. (See yesterday’s post for more on what Mint’s tool tries to do). Sounds simple, but I’ve never had the discipline to track my spending.

For example, I would love to see how the amount I spend on clothes stacks up against the amount I spend on food each month—these being my two largest expenses aside from rent. Perhaps I am looking to be shamed into cutting back on some of these things.

Impatient for the masochism to begin, I loaded in my debit and credit cards (it really does take seconds, as Mint promises), clicked on the Spending Trends tab and alas, shamed I was not. (more…)

We all know that we ought to keep a budget. Track our spending. Set goals. Stay within limits.

But it’s boring. It takes too much time. A computer ought to be able to do it, but software hasn’t made it truly brainless yet. Millions of users have tinkered with software like Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft Money, but it can take days of work to get them humming and hours more on a regular basis to keep them up to date.

In the last year or so, a handful of companies have taken their money-management efforts to the web. Two of them, Wesabe and Geezeo, came out of the gate first. The latest player, Mint, has won a host of accolades recently. It took best-of-show honors (and a $50,000 award) at the TechCrunch40 conference in September and shared the same award at the Finovate gathering not long after.

Mint aims to do two things. First, it grabs your bank, credit and debit-card transactions and tags them with categories (like restaurants, or gym) in order to track and display your spending patterns. Then, it tries to show you offers from other companies that would save you money – a phone/cable combo package to replace the separate services Mint sees on your debit-card statement or a credit card with a lower interest rate than the one it sees that you’re using.

The site is free. The only way Mint makes money is by collecting commissions from some of those companies with the better deals – and they only pay Mint if you click on their offers and start patronizing them.

Full disclosure: We at FiLife are also working on tools to help people assess their personal financial situation. At the same time, we want to help you sort through all the various offerings out there that could help you analyze your financial life.

That’s why we invited Mint founder Aaron Patzer to our office to do a live demo. Then, we each went home and tried to make Mint work as well with our own information as it did when Aaron was at the controls.

In the next couple of days, we’ll let you know what we discovered.

– Ron Lieber

So I’m switching my checking account over to Schwab, and my ATM cards turned up in the mail recently. Like most banks these days, Schwab’s ATM cards are also debit cards, which means they work both in ATM machines and anywhere Visa is accepted (some banks work with MasterCard instead).

I’ve never had a debit card, and I don’t want one now. They make little sense for people like me who only use credit cards to buy things.

Here’s how I came to this conclusion:

(more…)