I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an Android based phone when my contract with Verizon runs out and they try and entice me into signing a new one – however, my current phone is WinMo based, and I don’t really know how we can live without Quicken on it.
Seriously, I’ve found keeping track of accounts to be a nightmare without something like Quicken. I can’t seem to stop myself from using things like pay-at-the-pump for gas, which can be a real pain in the arse to keep track of. You get the crappy little charge of $1, which is usually removed immediately from your balance, then at some point between now and two weeks from now, the actual charge is added and the $1 authorization is removed.
That means when you look at the balance on, say, Paypal… you have to remember how many times you put gas in and about how much it was. With Quicken on my phone, I don’t have to – I just put the exact amount in on my phone before driving off, and then when I sync my phone up when I get home it reconciles everything for me.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any decent apps for Quicken on the Android platform. There’s a $3 add-on for “loot”, which will let you download .QIF format files… but that sucks. QIF is an ancient form of transaction download used from when internet banking was very, very young. I’m led to believe it was originally only intended for doing the initial download – as far as I know it’s nothing but a glorified and proprietary CSV format.
Before Paypal had proper Quicken-syncing (well, proper being used very liberally here – Paypal’s support of Quicken is still pretty damn terrible), we used to download the statements in QIF format and import them into Quicken, and it was almost always traumatic. There’s almost no handling of duplicate transactions, so if you’re not careful you end up with an account you can’t balance… so you’re going through checking off each transaction on two lists until you find one that doesn’t match. I don’t wanna spend $200 on a phone to do that all over again!
Enter Mint, which apparently works reasonably well from mobile devices. It’d also have the added bonus of my wife could check things from her computer, instead of going to mine or picking up my phone to check the balances. I was able to add access to almost all of our accounts (it’s not adding one, despite the fact I’m sure it’s the right bank and the credentials are correct) within a few minutes, and before long I was off playing with all manner of financial advisories.
I’m not sure I like it… I mean it’s one of those things where you like it, but you feel like you should hate it. It’s border line creepy having something go through your finances, automatically putting together a rough budget based on your history of spending – you almost feel like you’re being judged. Sure it pops up with savings and budgeting tips and I understand that the whole thing’s funded by them throwing bank and credit card offers at you to save you money, but it’s hard to let go of this silly notion of privacy.
You need to keep in mind that we readily surrender privacy all the time for the sake of convenience, and Mint is just a natural extension of that. It’s still unnerving though, I half expect the thing to come up with an alert “Szechuan Garden again? It’d be cheaper just to adopt a chinese teenager you know”.
On the whole though, it pretty much does what it says it will. The whole interface is an asynchronous DHTML wonderland, and unlike Quicken it’s pretty much maintenance free. There is, however a dealbreaker for me… you don’t appear to be able to enter a transaction manually – so you’re still left with the pay-at-the-pump problem above, except you’re looking at a different site instead. 
