Back in January, I evaluated two services, Wesabe and Mint, and basically saw big pros and cons for each.   Wesabe gave more control, Mint a better picture.  Well, I’ve been using Mint since it has an auto-upload feature and despite a few months when things weren’t working well with my bank, I have to say that now, Mint is better than ever and really kicks Wesabe’s butt in most cases–but it is actually depends on why you’re using it.

First off, Mint can now account for your checking, savings, credit and debit accounts.  They automatically categorize and show everything vs. your budget.   They have, since January, made it so that you can have customized categories, easily split, and quickly manage all kinds of transactions.   This pretty much puts them on even footing with Wesabe, except for the fact that Mint can download your account info without you having to manage things through one or two instances of firefox.

But Mint has even more abilities, like tracking loans and investments.   The Loans section currently tracks our home mortgage, and can track car loans, student loans and the like.  This gives you an even better picture of your overall debt.   The only negative is that it doesn’t keep any record of your assets, so if you have a house that might be sellable from between $150K and $200K in the current market, it would be nice to know that you owe $120K, but you have a value of approx. $150K.   Very tough to handle that, though, so maybe it’s not a big deal.

It can also handle your investments.    You can look at any of your IRA / Investment accounts and see the history and how they have performed and how they have compared to various indexes (DJIA, S&P, NASDAQ) and just have a much better picture of your investments than most of your monthly statments can give you.

As a result of this very vast and deep view of your finances, you can have a great idea of what your assets/debt ratio is and what your cash/debt ratio is.   This is valuable because the higher your cash/debt ratio, the better off you are financially.   Sometimes that’s hard to see without a complete picture.

Mint also has a few other neat features like budgets and comparisons.  You can set a budget and it will alert you when you are about to go over that budget at some point in the month.   You can also look at how you’ve been spending and compare it to other people in a given geographic region.   So I can know that, on average, Austinites (using Mint, I presume) spend $700/mo on food.   I’d like my spending to be lower than that — say, around $500 - $550 for my family.  Knowing that I’m roughly in the same ballpark tells me that I’m living in a lifestyle that is not trying to exceed people around me.  That’s neat stuff to know.

Anyway, I would highly recommend Mint.   It requires some trust on your part with usernames, passwords, etc, but it is exceptional at the picture it gives you over your finances.