Following up on my WaMu review I wanted to take a minute and review a new money management tool called Mint.com. Mint is an account aggregation service. The concept of financial account aggregation is not a new concept as Yodlee has been offering this service to banks for a number of years. As a basic concept Mint.com is not all that different. They even use the Yodlee service to run the back end of their application.
What makes Mint.com interesting is the customer experience they deliver. I do user experience for a living and can tell Mint has invested heavily in this area. I signed up for an account and was up and running in less than 5 minutes. From sign up to seeing 7 accounts aggregated in one screen took 5 minutes! Now granted, I am an advanced user who already had all my online accounts setup, but still 5 minutes is impressive. I do need to run this through the “Mom” test and see how long it would take my mom to go through and sign up.
Mint’s business model is an interesting one: they sell space to financial institutions that make offers to help you save money. They know the interest rate on your accounts and will make offers from competing banks that offer you a lower interest rate. Since I carry no consumer debt and already have a high yield savings account this feature has no value to me but for some it might be useful. I just hope they can make this model profitable.
Right now Mint only has bank accounts and credit cards included in the aggregation service but they claim to be adding mortgages and others soons. Brokerages and mortgaes would be a great addition!
Categorization is a key concept in all money management software. You want to be able to quickly see at the end of the month where all your money went. They have a super simple interface for categorizing transactions and even putting rules in place so that the same transaction next time is automatically categorized. However, they have one fundamental flaw that really reduces the usefulness of mint: you can’t create custom categories! Hopefully they will add this soon, because after playing with my accounts for 10 minutes I quickly ran into problems with the pre set categories.
Mint also has a simple budgeting system where you can set your budget each month and then track your spending against it. I do my simple budgeting in Excel but I will have to see how usefull this aspect of the service is.
Overall I am impressed so far. I think with a few changes this will really become a great little web app for managing your money.
Techcrunch is reporting that Victoria Secret has dropped N2N commerce. Wow! This is big news as N2N had made a huge push in the last year to gain a footing in the competitive ecommerce platform space. I even think they were the lead sponsor at Shop.org or Internet-Retailer this year!
This is really disappointing as I thought they had a good idea with this model. I helped implement Demandware at Gardener’s Supply which was the underlying technology behind N2N. I hope this decision will not have a ripple effect with Demandware as I think they still have a great offering.
Back in 2000 I started banking with a little known startup called Lighthouse Bank out of Waltham MA. They were one of the first banks to offer no fee checking, online banking, and ATM reimbursement fees. They had fantastic customer service and were great to work with but they started putting minimums in place. When I moved to Vermont I decided to leave lighthouse and join a local bank (Citizens) that also had online banking. At the same time, I also discovered the new found world of high yield online savings accounts and opened an account with Emigrant Direct. This setup worked great as I had local ATM’s, a free checking and an online savings account earning 5%. The only downside was I had a 3 day delay between transfers.
When I moved to Atlanta it was time to look for a new bank. Here are the key things I look for:
- Free checking with no minimum and no fee’s unless I do something stupid like bounce a check.
- Outstanding online interface to manage all my accounts. I have never balanced a check book and don’t plan on starting any time soon!
- Plenty of local ATM’s and ideally a branch close to home.
- High yield online savings account.
- Free checks is a nice bonus although I write about 5 a year
- Free online bill pay
- Great customer service with short wait times in the branch or on the phone.
When I started looking around I found that Washington Mutual met all of my criteria. Could a bank really do everything I was looking for??? After 2 years the answer is a resounding YES! WaMu is fantastic! I can’t recommend them enough! I have had nothing but a great experience with them and encourage everybody to sign up for accounts. Make sure you sign up online as they only offer the high yield Savings Account online. There is also a branch right across the street so that makes them super convenient as well!
This post detailing Sears’ use of tracking software is unbelievable! Sears is one of my top 5 competitors so I follow them pretty closely and this is big news. The VP’s response and the counterpoints are even more amazing.
You might have yourself covered from a legal perspective (page 10 of a 26 page privacy policy) but you are undermining your customers. People take privacy seriously. If you are going to install tracking software that monitors all internet behavior it better be explicit, in 20 point font, with a VERY clear OPT IN. With that said, I would never have approved something like this. I wonder what they were doing with the data and if they were getting any value out of it.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes them to pull this down
During my senior year at BC we had a speaker series where alums would come and speak about various career topics. One of the best pieces of advice I got from that series was to to make sure you update our resume once a year. Updating your resume can seem like a chore, but it is essential to go through the exercise and note your accomplishments. As we kick off the new year make sure you have a current copy of your resume. You never know when a recruiter is going to call you with the next hot job!
Wanted to take a minute and wish everybody a happy new year! Here’s to 2008 being better than 2007!
With my move to working more with php and ruby on rails I decided to ditch my windows hosting and move over to Unix and Apache. Most of the active open source projects run better on Apache and the mod_rewrite module is essential for creating easy search engine friendly links. I took a look at a bunch of different providers but settled on Dreamhost. They offer a ton of features for $11 a month and lit looks like they have a pretty good reputation. So far the migration has gone smoothly and everything is up and running. You can get a $50 discount on new hosting contracts if you use promo code: MYDREAM50
Before I started working for Home Depot I was an ASP developer for Gardener’s Supply and Burton Snowboards. I drank a lot of Microsoft kool-aid in those days and was an early adopter of asp.net. Since I was using Microsoft tools at work I never paid attention to any of the open source projects going on in PHP and more recently Ruby on Rails. It was not until I installed Wordpress for this blog did I realize how far these applications had come! So I have ditched my Microsoft allegiance and have started working with some great open source projects like modX and Magento. I am exited to start learning some of these new tools and to start working with PHP and Ruby. My first project was to convert my basic consulting website template over to PHP 
I like goals. Let’s see if I can hit them:
- Avgerage 2 posts a week
- 50,000 visits
- 100 people to tell me they found this information useful
The buzz in 2007 was all about web apps. Taking things that traditional desktop software handled and moving them online and enabling people to access them anywhere. I have created a new category called web applications and will be posting some reviews that highlight the very best. Here are some links to 2 past reviews I did:
Blogging: Wordpress is Awesome
Photo Sharing: Smugmug Photo Sharing
Things are in full swing and we have made some great progress on the wedding plans. April 13′th will be just around the corner!
Well those are the major items! Lot’s more little things to do. For more details on our wedding you can view our web site on the Knot.com
I have done a little house cleaning on the website and implemented the new K2 theme for Wordpress. Here are a few of the changes:
- It has some neat new Ajax functions that improve search and navigation.
- 3 column layout to get more information on the page.
- All the links are now search engine friendly and easy to read.
- Fast loading XHTML/CSS design
- Great widget interface for modifying things on the page
Let me know what you think!
Latest Comments
RSS