Mint.com is a free online personal finance tool currently used by over one million people. To use Mint, the first step is to create an account and link your existing savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts and outstanding debts to Mint. From there, users are provided with all sorts of useful information in one easy to use interface. Some of the most popular features include:
- Automatic categorization of purchases so that, for example, users can see how much they are spending per month on ATM fees or gasoline
- Analyze and graph investment performance so that, for example, users can view all of the stocks and options that they hold in their various brokerage accounts on one screen
- Customizable alerts can be sent via emails or text messages
- Algorithmically generated suggestions for ways to save money
Our reviewed brokers that can successfully link with Mint.com are as follows:
- E*TRADE
- Fidelity
- Firstrade
- Merrill Edge
- OptionsHouse
- optionsXpress
- Schwab
- Scottrade
- ShareBuilder
- TD Ameritrade
- thinkorswim
- TradeKing
- Vanguard
- WellsTrade
- Zecco
Here is a brief walk through of how to link your brokerage accounts to Mint and what you can do from there.
Step one is to create a Mint account. From there, your list of accounts appear on the left panel of screen. Select to edit this list and a new pane comes up with a search box (click on images for larger views):
We wanted to link our thinkorswim account so we searched for thinkorswim. Mint found what we were looking for and prompted us for our log in information for our thinkorswim account:
Mint took about a minute to successfully link the account. We went through the same process for our other brokerage accounts. Once we were done, we went back to the Overview menu. Our accounts now appear under Investments, with their appropriate balances:
If we click over to the Investments tab we can see more detailed information about our accounts. This includes a chart based performance comparison between the performance of our investments and either the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 or NASDAQ. Our chart is not useful because we have just linked our brokerage accounts but presumably this will work going forward.
Right below this chart is a complete list of our holdings held in aggregate. Clicking on the list of accounts on the left panel will display only those securities held at each broker. For those of us with many broker accounts, this is a fantastically useful tool:
Mint.com On The Go
Mint.com is now available on the iPhone and Android allowing investors to keep track of multiple brokerage accounts on the go. Here is a view of our various accounts as shown from the Mint.com iPhone app:
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