On the one hand I feel like I’m taking a giant gamble, and on the other I’ve never been more relieved.
After about two weeks of acknowledging its existence but being unwilling to dive in the deep end I signed up for an account on Mint.com. For you San Franciscans in the blogiance, this has noting to do with Karaoke. Mint.com is a financial management website that using “scraping” techniques to cull data from various financial institutions and bring it all to one web page.
I first read about it in last month’s issue of Wired. I was sorely tempted then, but scared to death of the security raminfications. Last night, after the uppteenth attempt to make hide or hair out of Quicken I finally caved.
So far so good. Aside from not being able to get one of the credit cards I have into the system I’m quite pleased. The Mint interface does away with all the nonsense that comes with downloading .qif and .qfx and .xz9sdyenh files. It just works.
That’s what I want from my computer systems. I want zen simplicity. I’m not a hot rodder and a modder, and while I like stuff cheap, I prefer to have tools I don’t have to think about. Mint provides that.
So far.
We’ll report on more later.
