I'm obsessed with our finances...

[Anonymous]

No OP -- that would drive me crazy . We live w/in our means and save, but we don't want to obsess over it. It's only mine -- don't let your obsession get in the way of your life/family.

[Anonymous]

I've always wanted to try mint.com, but DH is worried about security. Is there a risk to having all your info centralized in one place? Just seems a little scary. Every so often, some big bank/credit card company announces that there's been a breach in their security, so I don't automatically trust even large, well-reputed financial institutions. (Or is it that an oxymoron??)

[Anonymous]

I'm obsessed too but use quicken and excel. I credit the discipline with helping us cash flow DH's masters and not touch our savings while he is in school and DD is in infant daycare. I might loosen up when he has a salary again and she is in preschool.

[Anonymous]

what I like about mint is that the updates are automatic (although about a day late for retirement accounts, etc.). Transactions can come through the day-of. What I like is the list of transactions. They just come one right after the other until suddenly you see something odd. You can figure out what it is -- a mistake, fraud, etc. and fix it. You can see what bills look high over time and do something about it (phone service for example -- why did I never notice that we were paying $40 to MCI for long distance each month but we had free minutes through our cell phones? stupid!). You drive down your regular bills, and then look for patterns. You can anticipate extra funds coming in or fewer expenses and move the extra over to savings where you might not spend it as readily. I just like the automaticity of it. What I don't like is that sometimes it doesn't recognize certain accounts all of a sudden, or that Bank of America freaks out and locks out mint users. That takes time to fix at mint which makes the service less useful for that time period.

[Anonymous]

I have NEVER heard of a problem with mint.com security. All the people who are gunshy will look back in a few years and realize their fears were unfounded.

[Anonymous]

Nope, I don't obsess at all. I look at mint primarily to see real time if anyone has lifted our credit card numbers or somethign like that.

We max out 401K and then save 15% of our net income and then blow everything else that is left over on anything our little hearts desire.

[Anonymous]

Love Mint.com - still figuring out some of the idosyncrasies. I was never able to keep up while tracking things on Quicken. Love that Mint is totally automatic. It is totally secure - or as secure as banks, anyway.

[Anonymous]

This reminds me of a friend who told me he is obsessed with his work numbers. He has a quota requirement job and the place tracks so many different factors for retention, bonus and promotion.

[Anonymous]

you people are scary.