App Aims: Making Personal Financial Stability a Reality

Reviewer’s Comments
With all the buzz the Mint.com app is garnering, we really wanted to be blown away by the utility of the program, hoping that it would be the be-all and end-all to financial apps. Unfortunately, the breeze that the app actually created only mussed our hair. Mint.com is simply a read-only front end for the beefier web site of the same name. The online site has numerous tools and articles that make tracking your finances easy and relatively painless. Setting up a free account online is fairly simple and the developers maintain it only takes five minutes which is pretty accurate. Supported financial institutions are supposedly in the thousands but we were unable to locate a couple of credit unions that we use and couldn’t add them either.

The app provides information on your current finances that would be really useful if it were up to date. The app automatically updates every 24 hours which isn’t often enough. Twelve or thirteen hours into the refresh schedule, you’re already looking at outdated information. If the app auto-refreshed every time you logged into it, the usability would be greatly enhanced. There is a refresh button in the upper right corner of the overview screen but the information presented didn’t change even though there were changes in the accounts. Another item of concern was the lack of security. If you log out of the app, the information is deleted from your iPhone or iPod touch but if you just close the app, the info is still there and easily accessible to anyone using your device. The app really needs password protection of some kind.

The web site is impressive and extremely helpful—well worth the small effort of setting up a free account. The Mint.com app still needs some refining to be truly useful but we have high hopes that it will still become a go-to personal finance app.

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