Tracking personal finances...

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Tracking personal finances...

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See here

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I have used mint.com for 4 years now... It is awesome.

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Looks cool, but I'm leery at giving any site the login credentials for all my accounts. I hope everyone who does this uses a password manager like Keepass and generates random strings for the answers to the verification questions that are used when you try to log on from a different computer.

Me, I've used several versions of Microsoft Money since 1995 or so, and now use the "Sunset Edition" they made available for free after discontinuing Money a few years ago. It's entirely local to my computer, which is what I want.

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Check the website, I believe they say it is as safe as online banking.

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I did check out the website before I wrote what I did. If they ever have a breach, apparently the thieves will get the user names and passwords for all your financial accounts, because you have to give those credentials to mint.com. While mint.com tries to reassure you that they are "read-only" WRT to your accounts, all bets are off if someone is able to steal this information. I didn't see anything to indicate they transform your credentials into something that can only be used by mint.com, and I don't know if such a thing even exists. If not, the only thing that will stand in the way of the crooks are the security questions at each institution, which should be treated like any password, i.e. made from a long random string, with no duplications whatsoever from question to question or account to account.

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Its open-auth passthrough, they're not storing anything.

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How can mint log on to your various accounts without storing your credentials that are required to log on, which they require you to give to them just once in order to log on to your accounts then and in the future?

What is different about mint's log on procedure compared to yours in terms of the information transmitted?

Mom2KandK,

Did you import your info from Microsoft Money to YNAB?

I use Money (Sunset Edition) and have over ten years of data. It works great for me, but I will have to make a move eventually and don't want to lose the historical info.

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I use Quicken

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Same for me, never had any problems.

It's on the left hand side of the screen towards the bottom.

It won't auto compute appreciation for you, but you can update it yourself.

I half arse use mint. One thing I struggle with is how to categorize things. For those that are diligently using it, how do you keep track and assign purchases to budgets at places such as Walmart. In other words, I can buy groceries, electronics, ect at Walmart, but it just assigns it to groceries (right now anyway). How are you guys handling these type of overlapping transactions? Or do you give a shite?

Good to know. Wasn't aware they had this feature.