Mint vs. Wesabe - Financial Flavors

With the economic downturn recently souring the financial affairs for many Americans, there are a lot of questions concerning how to best track, manage, and take control of one’s money. With an emerging selection of online tools and money-management sites, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available for taming the almighty dollar. Fortunately there seems to be a site for every type of personality, and few contrast in their styles more than Mint and Wesabe.

Both websites exist to help users track and control their personal finances, both are able to import live account information from your banks and credit card companies, and both are able to visualize the data via charts comparing relative expenses versus income. However it is at around this point that the similarities come to a screeching halt. Let’s start by taking a look at Mint.

In a nutshell, Mint takes the conventional approach to money management: tracking one’s expenses and automatically categorizing them based on transaction data pulled from credit card and bank statements. If it has a price tag, you can track it in Mint: investment accounts, cash, loans, credit cards; even physical property such as your home or automobile. One can tag, modify, categorize, and arrange expenses in a wide variety of ways, viewing them on charts and graphs that are both eye-catching and effective. When it comes to slicing, dicing, and displaying personal finance data and trends, Mint undoubtedly takes the cake.

Optional budgeting functionality is integrated with one’s account, and you can see a thoroughly complete listing of suggested categories if you get stumped while figuring out how to plan your spending. While it isn’t required, a budget can help bring out some of the coolest features Mint brings to the table: summaries and alerts.

Automated email summaries for your accounts along with customizable alerts are both highlights which Mint excels at when compared to the rest of the competition. Both can arrive by email or text; summaries giving you an “at-a-glance” overview of all your accounts and where you stand. Alerts can trigger on a wide range of customizable criteria, such as a deposit to your checking account exceeding a certain amount or an unusually large purchase that exceeds your normal spending patterns.

Mint is ultimately a passive tool for monitoring and dissecting financial data and trends.

It works quickly “out of the box” without any extra fiddling before it becomes useful. After I imported my bank data, I was immediately able to start learning all sorts of interesting facts about my exciting financial position, such as the average amount I spent per month on auto maintenance for my 1995 Buick LeSabre ($384… ouch!) in addition to seeing where my spending within different categories and stores stacked up compared to averages within cities, states, and the US as a whole.

However, Mint leaves it entirely in the user’s hands to determine how to best make use of the data it gives you. The suggested ways to save money boil down to little more than credit card and bank account offers. In my eyes, Mint does an excellent job giving you the information you need to determine what you should do, but it doesn’t tell you exactly HOW to do it. This is where Wesabe enters the comparison.

Wesabe is, in essence, money management with a Web 2.0 twist. Unlike Mint, Wesabe does not automatically categorize expenses or income, and leaves the entire classification process to the user via tags. One can set default tags for particular merchants, however, which speeds things up a bit. This lets you mark, for instance, The Dollar Tree, as “cheap, shopping, snacks” every time it shows up on your statement without having to manually tag it each time. Furthermore you can apply one-time tags for specific instances, such as “business expense”, “date”, “government bribe” and the like.

The beauty of Wesabe lies in how it aggregates community data on what stores are tagged with what terms and then offers “tips” related to those merchants. For example tips often compare a given store with nearby alternatives that either offer lower prices or better value as reflected by how highly other users have rated them and how often they shop there.

On top of that, Wesabe enables you to tie specific tags to spending targets, which is essentially another version of budgets. One can set goals to help determine spending targets, even viewing the most popular goals within the Wesabe community. These goals can be everything from “save for a car” or “pay off credit cards” to “be more eco-conscious” and so forth. Users can mark and announce when they complete specific goals, offering tips and advice to the rest of the community on how to do it themselves.

In true 2.0 fashion, Wesabe lives and dies by its community. Tips are created by Wesabeans, associated with tags created by Wesabeans, and displayed based on popularity determined by votes from Wesabeans. The result is that Wesabe is a more lively and dynamic place to manage your money than Mint, boasting active input from other users and relevant advice based on your spending habits. This means that while Wesabe requires more participation from its user before it starts to pay off, it does eventually provide the user with MUCH more useful information on how you can get more bang from your buck than Mint offers. For instance, in my case Wesabe recommended that I try out a new bookstore, because the suggested location was both less expensive and better rated than my current choice. All of this advice was unbiased by advertisers, being completely based on the experiences of others who shop at similar places and have similar goals.

That being said, I prefer Mint for my money.

Wesabe’s benefits are quite remarkable, but they come at the price of time spent tagging one’s data on a continual basis to get the same amount of “hard” data that Mint provides out of the box. While Mint will not ever offer intelligent suggestions or alternative places to shop, this is not what I care about. I want a tool to track my money; I’ll use other resources to research and compare different places to shop and blogs to learn how to save money if I have the need to do so. I feel like Wesabe tries too hard to be too many things: a finance tracker, a community, an advice column, and a comparison shopping guide – the result is that it seems too cluttered for my tastes.

Ultimately it’s a matter of preference; are you an active money manager looking for a flexible way to track your progress towards goals while looking for advice on how to reach them all at the same time? Dip that wallet in some Wesabe. Only care about raw metrics and hard numbers, without the community buzz? Have some Mint.

Either way, there’s a financial flavor out there for everyone.