My Favorite Budgeting App Mint.com - What I Don't Like

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll talk what I don't like about Mint.com -- my budgeting program of choice.  This is the last of a 3 part series on how I use Mint.

In the last two videos, I did a quick tutorial on Mint.com, which I use for budgeting and I talked about what I like about Mint.  In this video, I'll share what I wish it did better:

• Security - I wish I didn't have to give my bank account login credentials to Mint.  That said, if I want the convenience of having all of my transactions in one place, this is the price I have to pay.  Thankfully, Mint isn't some 2 bit, fly by night operation.  They are owned by Intuit, who also owns TurboTax and Quicken.  They have some experience in keeping data safe.  Here's what Intuit says on their website about how they store this data: "Login user name and passwords are stored securely in a separate database using multi-layered hardware and software encryption."  Obviously, after the Equifax breach less than a year ago, we all have reason to be squeamish, but this is an area where I've chosen to trade security for convenience.
• Budgeting:
  • One thing that bothers me in the area of budgeting is that, although Mint allows you to create new budget categories, you have to do it within their conceptual paradigm -- in other words, you have to pick one of their existing categories to put your new subcategory under.  Here's an example, I have a category that's just called Lara.  That's kind of like my discretionary allowance -- I can spend it on books, clothes, dining, whatever.  Okay -- it doesn't naturally fall into one of their default categories -- but I have to pick one anyway, so I somewhat arbitrarily pick "Financial."  The annoying thing about that is that in the budget screen Mint insists on sorting your line items by their superordinate category "Financial" rather than "Lara", which is what I would prefer. 
  • But far MORE annoying is that you can't delete any of their default accounts.  That isn't such a big deal in the budget screen -- after all, you only see the budgets that you create and you don't have to create a budget for every categories.  But it is annoying when you are trying to apply categories to your accounts since they will all come up as options.  So, if I'm looking for my category Auto All, every default category with Auto in the title comes up as well even if i only want to use 2 of them.  It's not insurmountable, it's just annoying.  
  • The other big budgeting drawback for me is that Mint assumes that the Budget you are creating shouldn't be retroactive, so it only makes it active in the current month and beyond.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to edit this.  That means that if you are entering a budget in March and would like to see how you have performed against this budget since January -- you are totally out of luck.  It will only show you March on.  Once you get your budget more or less set, this will be less annoying, but it crops up every time I make changes to my budget (so at least annually) since I can't make them retroactive at all.
• Search - You'd think there would be a fairly robust search function with Mint.  It's not terrible on the Mint website, but it drives me nuts that you can't search by note in the transaction.  Remember how I put a note into a transaction that it was for Tubing?  If I try to search for the keyword "Tubing", nothing comes up, because Mint doesn't search on notes at all.  I put a lot of information in the notes section, so if I want to find the transaction when I bought our refrigerator, I have to search for Lowes and then open each transaction individually.  This is half the reason I use the Export function since search is better in a spreadsheet.   Search isn't great on the website, but it is TRULY AWFUL on their mobile app.  In fact, the mobile app has quite a few limitations.  Let’s talk about them
• Mobile App - I really want the mobile app to have a lot more functionality than it does.  Up until recently, you could opt to use a browser like Safari on your mobile device and go to Mint's website to get full functionality, but they have started forcing you to use the app, which is problematic for me.  Here are my issues with it

• Search - is perfectly awful.  You can't really search by amount or keyword.  Instead, it forces you to pick a specific vendor name.  And, for example, if you vendor name is listed different ways in different transactions (which is very common), it will only show transactions where you've chosen the EXACT spelling.  It's awful.  It's so frustrating to me that I've taken to either exporting everything for mobile search purposes or just waiting until I get in front of a computer.
• Transactions - edits to transactions (like changing vendor name or category) don't always stick, so sometimes you have to go back and redo them.  I can't figure out why some take and others don't -- it's a mystery to me.  Also you can do most transaction edits in your mobile app, but you can’t apply if/then rules. 
• Budget - For whatever reason, the mint app only allows you to see the budget in the current month.  Can't see last month, can't see the full year -- only this month.  It's maddening. 
• Export - Export doesn't work from the app, only from the website.

So, you can see I have some complaints, but I haven't found a better option yet.  And I'm pretty happy with the convenience and functionality that Mint provides, so I plan to continue to be a Mint user and hope that they address some of the drawbacks.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!