Does Mint Have A Check Register

Mint is an exceptional personal finance service that has won multiple Editors' Choice awards thanks to its simplicity, usability, and smart financial tools. It lets you set up connections to your online finance accounts, check your credit score, and get a good estimate of your net worth, among many other things. Even better, Mint is free, which is possible because the service frequently displays targeted ads for credit cards and other finance products.

Mint's developers continue to leverage machine-learning technology (AI) to provide a smarter, more personalized, more automated experience that features deeper insight and intelligence. The service features enhanced navigation tools, and it proactively encourages you to improve your money management techniques instead of passively tracking accounts. Its mobile apps are tremendously improved, too. Basically, what's made Mint the PCMag Editors' Choice pick for free personal finance management for many years (including 2021) just keeps getting better. Quicken Deluxe wins our Editors' Choice award this year for paid personal finance software.

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You can assign transaction categories and tags to easier track expenses.

Simple Setup

Mint offers a feature tour when you create your account, then launches right into requesting usernames and passwords for your banking, credit card, and other financial accounts. The site is fairly useless unless you agree to make these connections, since it uses this data for everything. That said, you can manually enter transactions.

There are a few other setup tasks that you access by clicking the Profile or Settings links in the upper toolbar (there's a lot of overlap in these two sections). These screens let you enter your demographic information, which helps better target ads. You can also view all of your accounts, turn features off and on, and complete other setup tasks. The most critical one is Notifications. Click it, and you can request (or opt out of) email and on-site updates that alert you to, for example, upcoming bills or credit score changes. You can also ask to be notified if an account balance drops below a certain level or credit availability dips below a specified dollar amount.

Similar Products

It's entirely up to you how much information you let Mint track. If you want a comprehensive picture of your finances and the best possible recommendations from the service, you should connect to as many accounts as possible. This includes assets like your home and vehicles. Mint links to third-party sites to get estimates of their value.

One of Mint's best aspects is that within moments of setting up an account, it already sees habits and trends in your spending because it's pulled a few months' worth of data from the past to analyze. In other words, you get insight into your financial health right away. Mint has access to your history, so it displays what you've been doing with your money within minutes of setting up your account.

This automation and use of historical data to give you a head start on visualizing your finances contribute to Mint's superiority. CountAbout and other services provide instant feedback based on the import of past transactions, but none of them match Mint's insight and exceptional user experience. The new Simplifi by Quicken comes close in this regard, but it lacks Mint's maturity and overall comprehensive personal finance coverage.

Mint reports your credit score and explains why it is what it is. Ads for financial products like credit cards are interspersed with your financial data, which is why the site is free.

Money Matters

Mint's interface is exceptional, both visually and in terms of usability. It's clean, crisp, colorful, and so simply designed that it's hard to get lost. The Overview screen—Mint's dashboard—is also good. It shows a one-page summary of every element of your financial picture. It updates once per day, or more often if you force an update. You can also customize it to contain only what you want to see, which you may want to do: Mint demands a significant amount of scrolling to see everything.

The left vertical pane displays all of your financial accounts and assets along with their total value. The service tallies these, and presents you with your total assets and debts, and, of course, your current net worth. In addition, its charts highlight Cash vs Credit Card Debt and Net Income over the previous six months. You have total control over what is and is not included here. For example, if you want to exclude real estate from your net worth, you can. If you want to exclude an emergency fund from showing up in your available funds, you can. If you want to exclude a joint checking account from your personal budgets, you can do that, too.

The right pane includes a list of upcoming bills, a spending chart, your current credit score, and a graph of your current budget versus actual spending. If you've established goals and linked to your accounts, you'll see your progress and status. A series of graphical links take you to financial products that Mint thinks you might like. Beyond viewing data, you can take actions from this opening screen, such as managing your budgets and marking bills as paid.

Handling Transactions

Though you can initiate many activities from the opening screen, there's a lot more to Mint. A toolbar at the top divides the site into its individual functions: Transactions, Credit Score, Bills, Budgets, Goals, Trends, Investments, and Ways to Save.

You'll probably spend a lot of time working on the Transactions page, the place where all the data appears that Mint's imported from your cash and credit accounts. The site displays them in what looks like a checkbook register. Each entry shows the date, description (usually the payee), category, and amount. Mint guesses each transaction's category (such as Food & Dining, Shopping, Entertainment, and Bills & Utilities), and does it quite well, but occasionally you need to manually change it. Mint lets you edit subcategories, but not the main categories themselves.

To work further with a transaction, click the Edit Details link below it. There, you can assign tags and add to the list of offered suggestions, such as Tax-Related, Reimbursable, and Vacation. You can also split the transaction between multiple categories, mark it as a duplicate, and add a note. Its transaction management tools overall are good, but not quite as detailed as Quicken Deluxe's similar tools.

Assuming you entered your Social Security number during setup, Mint automatically pulls your credit score from TransUnion and presents the number on its Overview and under the Credit Score link in the toolbar. You can get a little more detail about your credit score and the factors that influence it, but you don't get a full credit. Credit Karma pays for itself by suggesting financial products that might appeal to you.

Mint lets you connect to your billers, and get information about your debts. However, it doesn't let you pay bills.

A few years ago, Mint stopped supporting its bill-paying tools (this feature is available in Quicken Deluxe, for an extra fee). You can still schedule and track bills, though, in one of two ways. You can connect to your billers' sites by entering your username and password. Mint pulls in the payment amount and due date, but you'll have to handle the actual transaction outside of Mint. Once you've done that, you click a Mark as Paid and link and view your payment history with the vendor. You can also manually add bills that aren't linked to a biller's site. Either way, bill reminders appear on the dashboard.

Budgets and Goals

Many people dislike budgeting because it's hard to predict what you'll spend in regards to different category purchases. Mint simplifies this for you by presenting existing data in the form of the categorized transactions that it pulls in from your online accounts. In fact, the first time you select Budgets (assuming you've imported transactions and categorized them), Mint will have already started your budgets for you. You can edit budget categories and add your own.

You set up a monthly budget for individual categories, rather than entering all of the data on a spreadsheet. Mint tracks your related spending.

We usually think of a budget as one giant spreadsheet. Mint calls each category a budget, and each is represented by a colored vertical line. It shows your budgeted amount vs. what you've actually spent (or received) by both filling in the line proportionately and displaying the actual numbers (like $185 of $200). Hover your cursor over one, and you can increase or decrease the budgeted amount by clicking arrows. Click Edit Details, and the Edit Your [Clothing, for example] Budget window opens. You can specify whether you want the budget to occur once, every month, or every few months, and enter a dollar amount. If you choose Monthly, you can start each new month with the previous month's leftover amount. A line graph shows how your budget compares to the national average.

Mint's Goals section comes with nine predefined financial goals and the option to create custom ones. You can plan to save for a vacation, put away money for a down payment on a house, or pay off your credit card debt, for example. Smart, multistep calculators help you establish a plan that will work for meeting your goals and tie it into an existing Mint account or a new one.

The Investments section is Mint's least informational and interactive area, though it should serve you well unless you're a day trader. You can connect to your brokerage accounts and monitor your positions. Mint updates your prices and lets you view your holdings by highest value, best performers, and worst performers. You can view charts ranging from five days to one year for market indexes or stocks. Mint also lets you view your portfolio's performance, allocation, and value. If you want more in-depth support and tools, Personal Capital is a better choice for that element of your finances. It, too, is free.

The Trends screen in Mint is where you can customize and create reports, using numerous filters.

How Are You Doing?

The reward for conscientiously categorizing transactions and setting goals is a page full of charts and graphs that provides financial insights. Click Trends to see them. They include multiple spending, income, assets, debts, and net worth views. You can customize these with several filters, and compare the results to those of last year or the previous month, for example. If you want to do more sophisticated analysis, you can export the underlying data in CSV format. This is a very effective, informative page—Mint's version of reports.

Ads and Security

Mint uses targeted advertising—very targeted advertising. The service knows exactly how much interest you're earning or paying on all your financial accounts, as well as any annual fees you pay, so it can suggest banks and accounts from its ad network that can give you a better rate. It shows you not only the better rate, but also how much you can save over one, two, and three years. You can simply close irrelevant ads.

Mint drops financial product ads within its presentation of your personal finance data and tools, but you can also search for offers that will meet your needs.

I understand that Mint has to pay for itself somehow, and that some of these ads may be helpful to many users. I thought there were too many of them, though. They often got in the way. But I'm not currently shopping for credit. Like its competitors, Mint accepts compensation from financial institutions that may impact the order in which their financial products appear or where they are placed on the site. Mint's ads do not represent the entire universe of credit cards that are available, for example.

Mint uses bank-grade security, which means it doesn't even have access to what you type. From the Mint interface, you can't initiate transfers of money or payouts of any kind, which means no one else can either.

Mobile Money

We used to consult our wallets or checkbook balances to see available funds while out in the world, but nowadays many people pull out their phones. Mint's mobile apps make this possible. With the exception of a few cosmetic differences, the Android and iOS app are identical. You can create accounts, transactions, and budgets; receive alerts; and view a truncated version of Trends. The app now lets you track investment transactions, goals, and bills.

#MoveMints, a new feature on Mint's mobile apps, gives you an engaging graphical overview of your previous month's finances. Click the new Monthly tab on Mint's mobile apps to see financial data like budgets, cash flow, and spending categories.

The Overview has completely changed since I last reviewed Mint's apps. Now, your credit score appears at the top. Click it, and you see a breakdown of the elements that make up the score, and how well you're doing with each. Below that, you can toggle between your net worth and a chart that compares your current spending to last month's. Totals for your cash, credit card debt, loans, investments, and property come after that, followed by a list of your recent transactions. Link to educational content and, of course, ads round out this excellent screen

Additional icons along the bottom of the screen open Notifications, the Marketplace (suggestions for financial products you might explore), and the new Monthly view. Click on the Monthly icon, and you find some new and some old content, including budget and goal information and your current monthly cash flow. There's also a great chart that breaks down your spending into transactions, categories, and merchants. You can see which bills are pending and look at a list of your recurring monthly subscriptions. There's also a link to the app's financial guide, which contains a lot of articles about how COVID-19 might be affecting your finances. This screen is a great compilation of the data you need to see at a glance.

The apps are now incorporating sound and animation to liven things up. The new #MoveMints monthly wrap-up that you can open when you click the Notifications tab provides a very visual, graphical overview of your finances from the previous month. For example, your spending totals appear in little bubbles that bounce around the screen. This is a helpful compilation presented in an imaginative, attractive way that I've never seen on a personal finance website. It's well done, and it doesn't hurt to add a little whimsy to such a serious topic (though I could have done without the background music). The Notifications screen also addresses additional business, like accounts that need attention, overdue bills, and high spending in specific areas.

Though Mint's apps don't replicate the desktop experience entirely, they give you access to the information you're likely to need when you're away from home or the office. The apps have an optional passcode lock. If you jump to another app and then return, Mint asks for the 4-digit passcode. And the app wipes your data every time you sign out. These are good security practices.

Mint Condition

In these days of financial uncertainty, keeping track of your money is more important than ever. Mint's ease of use, creative presentation of data and tools, and smart personal finance tools make it the best choice for people who want to track and manage their income and spending, budgets, savings goals, and investments. And if you know where you've been financially, it's easier to take actions that will affect your future in a positive way. The fact that it's free makes it even more appealing. Mint once again reigns as the PCMag Editors' Choice pick for free personal finance services, while Quicken Deluxe takes the crown for paid personal finance services.

Mint

Cons

The Bottom Line

Mint is a free personal finance service that's in a class by itself. No web-based rival provides as comprehensive a collection of tools for tracking your income, spending, budgeting, and goals.

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