The answer is "no more for now". Jed told me about Mint.com today and I started liking it immediately, which ended my long-term struggling with Quicken. Although I still feel a bit scary to put all my fiance information there.
Mint.com has a very clean and intuitive interface, just like many other great web products. The feature I like the most about Mint.com is that it is so easy to set up bank accounts. I had a really tough time about it when I was using Quicken. Quicken always asked me for all kinds of PINs which I don't have. But on Mint.com, my on-line bank login information just worked well. It also perfectly recognizes all my transactions, marks spending as negative and earning as positive. So I can clearly see how much money I have and how much debts I carry.
Mint.com provides a great set of features to modify and tag transactions. You can easily add note, split anamount, set filters and tag a transaction. The tagging is especially handy. For example, I can tag those expenses that I will get reimbursement later and filter them out when I generate reports or charts.
Mint.com provides several really useful charting features. The pie charting of expense is especially cool and functional. You can easily zoom into any category to see sub categories or individual transactions.
Besides basic bank information management, Mint.com can also help with investment, which I haven't got time to dig more yet.
Last but not the least, Mint.com is web-based and I can use it whenever I want.
Many people hesitate to jump in. Their biggest concern is about the privacy. Aaron Patzer, Mint.com's founder, explained how Mint.com protect people's privacy. I think it makes sense. The only part I don't quite buy is:
We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information.
I guess once an user types in a username/password, Mint.com creates a tunnel with the bank and that tunnel keeps existing until the user change password or something else happens. Not sure about this though. I hope Mint.com could explain it in more details.
The business model of Mint.com is also interesting. There is no obvious ads, but Mint.com recommends you some bank deals, such as credit cards with more rewards, checking accounts with higher interests ratio and so on. I feel that Mint.com should do something beyond this to earn money.
The way I see Mint.com is that it requires almost zero effort to use but solves 80% problems. If you start managing your money. Try Mint.com before you HAVE TO spend money and time on those complicated application.
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