Americans younger than 35 spend, on average, 16 percent more than they earn. College graduates leave school with an average of $20,000 in student loans and credit-card debt of almost $3,000.
Those stats are the lead in a recent Fast Company article. And those Gen X spendthrifts are the folks targeted by Aaron Patzer, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of Mint.com (previously blogged about here).
Patzer and Mint are the focus of the Easy Money column in the magazine’s December issue. Also quoted is personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich.
It’s a generally positive look at Mint, which the article calls "the Axe Bodyspray of personal finance — cool, fresh, and even sexy."
Personally, I don’t find the site’s attraction quite as dramatic. But then, I’m not one of those Gen Xers Patzer is seeking.
I’m still not comfortable putting all my financial info on a program run by someone else, even with all of Mint’s promised safeguards. And I actually like balancing my checkbook each month, something Patzer says Mint makes meaningless.
I also found Fast Company’s final assessment of the money management service interesting: "In the long run, for Mint to succeed in being useful, it may have to give up being fun. It’s telling that the first additional feature Patzer’s users asked for was a way to monitor their student-loan accounts, not exactly an enjoyable task for most people."
Meg
I have used Mint for about 6 months now, and I LOVE it. I certainly don’t think of it as “cool” or “sexy” though, and I don’t consider myself a spendthrift.
I do really like that it automatically categorizes my expenditures. Plus it automatically generates great charts showing how much I spend on entertainment, dining out, shopping–along with gifts, taxes, housing expenses, and investing, and many other categories.
Some of the “younger” features are things like that you can set your own monthly limits in each category (or just a few you really want to track) and MInt keeps a running tally of how close you get to your self-imposed limit. It’ll even email you if you get close or go over, when a deposit gets posted, etc (you can choose your alerts). And it tells you your most frequented merchants in different categories, plus those that you spend the most $$ at. Very good info I’d never track on my own! I thought I knew what I spent, but I have learned some interesting things.
As for security, Mint uses Yodlee, the same system used by Bank of America and lots of other financial institutions.
Kay
Meg, I’m glad it works for you. I guess I’m still a bit old school; plus many years ago I created my own expenditure tracking spreadsheet, so I’m getting that on my own. I was a bit slow in getting into epayments, so maybe I’ll eventually avail myself of servies like Mint out there. Kay
Financial Asset Management by Michael Weiss
I really enjoyed reading your views i am totally agree with you.