In Search of a British Mint

About a year and a half ago, I met and fell in love with a wonderful, handsome, caring free online financial software. Her name was Mint.com.

She was colorful (but only in soothing, Real Simple tones), easy to use, and useful. She downloaded my up to-the-minute account information for my checking accounts, savings accounts, credit card accounts, student loan accounts, and (yes I am that cool) 401K. She suggested tags for all of my transactions (but still let me edit them!), and then tracked how much I'd spent out of each budget category limit I set. She had fun charts and graphs about my spending and was just so pretty. It was all a little reminiscent of Miranda's affair with her Tivo in Season Six of Sex and the City (oh I went there).

Disaster struck when I was preparing to move to England for school. Mint did not want to do long distance. The horrible truth: Mint does not support international accounts! How to keep track of all my accounts on either side of the pond? For a year, I didn't, with less than thrilling results. But this week I took the plunge and tried out some other free sites.

This article at Bankling does a good job of summarizing the three leading online budgeting tools: my beloved Mint, Quicken and Wesabe. It concludes...

Mint: "Robust and graphic-intense, yet still simple enough to set up." Swoon!
Quicken: " Simple and very easy to use."
Wesabe: "The community aspect of Wesabe makes it stand out from Mint.com and Quicken Online, and hopefully they’ll add support for investment accounts soon."

However, the article does not address my specific *international* needs, and misses some other important stuff. First, only Quicken and Wesabe support bank accounts opened outside of the U.S., hence the reason I bid a tearful goodbye to lady Mint.

Second, Wesabe is lacking in major ways. To begin with, the account access is not as streamlined as Mint and Quicken. To set it up you actually guide a Firefox add-on through logging into each of your accounts (even if you have three accounts at one bank i.e. one website and login).

This situation would be manageable except that the credit card accounts only update according to statements, rather than current transactions! This is very unfortunate because your balance will be anywhere from 1 to 30 days behind. Not very helpful for real-time budgeting. You also need to individually tag all of your own transactions and it can't download federal student loans.

Quicken, however, is easy to use, although nowhere near as pretty as Mint. It also accessed all of my various accounts, including my federal student loans. Unfortunately, Quicken's online version is not able to handle multiple currencies (Wesabe's is!). It's just putting everything into dollars, which is extremely frustrating.

In the end it all comes out like this:

Mint
+ Smooth account access
+ 401k and student loan account access
+ Up to the minute budget management
- No international accounts

Quicken
+ Smooth account access
+ 401k and student loan account access
+ Up to the minute budget management
- No multiple currency support

Wesabe
- Clunky account access
- No 401k or student loan account access
- End of the month budget management
+ Multiple currency support

I'm going to give the Wesabe account a chance and hold onto it for a few weeks. But so far I'm not impressed and am pretty sure I'll end up deleting the Wesabe account (one definite plus is the Delete My Membership link is easy to find on the homepage under My Profile) and hanging onto the Quicken. I sadly may need to use Quicken only for British accounts and keep Mint for U.S. accounts. This isn't ideal but at least I'll have a tool for my Oxford budgeting!