Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Mint: Good Riddance to Paper Bank Statements, Highlighters

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?

Well, it’s more comprehensive than either my Washington Mutual Spending Profile or Mint competitor Wesabe. Mint takes into account all of my bank and credit card accounts (WaMu just looks at my WaMu credit card), and Mint tapped into my accounts more easily than Wesabe did. One of Mint’s recommendations is sharp - it suggested the same credit card for me that our personal shopper did.

That said, Mint mistags some individual transactions, sometimes missing obvious vendors like the Gap and Starbucks. It got about 70% of them right on the first try.

The inaccuracies didn’t bother me as much as they bothered Tara and Irina though. I actually found the act of retagging to be a good exercise in retrospective spending analysis (that bag of lousy loose-leaf tea cost HOW much?). Like Irina, I wish I could tag ATM withdrawals with two categories; Damon from Mint left a comment for us last night noting that this feature may be coming soon.

Mint lacks the community features of Wesabe, where I can share tips and read advice from others if I want. But Mint’s graphs are what help me most. Knowing to use reusable bags vs. paper or plastic at the grocery store (a Wesabe tip I received from a fellow user) is nice, but knowing that I’m spending a ton dining out (a Mint pie-chart revelation) will more greatly affect my behavior.

But step back for a sec - how cool is it that there are all sorts of free personal finance tools to choose from now? It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was reviewing paper copies of my bank statements with a highlighter and learning how to balance a checkbook.

I look forward to letting the highlighters collect dust.

–Mary Pilon