Mint vs. Quicken vs. Insert Banking App Here

[TWBuddha]

Question, folks..

I want to track my spending habits and .. I'm not a math genius. While I've taken a look at Quicken in the past, I suspect that it does more than I need. I'm not looking looking to juggle assets and move money. I don't have that many accounts; in fact, I have one savings account and a credit card that I hope to monitor. I should point out that I have an iPhone and have played with several of the expense apps, but... it's a manual process and I am not patient. Mint.com looks incredible, but is it safe? I think they say that it's simply an analysis tool - that it doesn't store banking info, but.. not sure.

I hear Quicken for Mac is horrible and.. I have Fusion; I suppose I could go and run Quicken for Windows, but.. too much work. What do you think? Is Quicken Online a good option? Would you trust Mint for my situation? I'm really just hoping to sit back, play with some cool and easy-to-understand trend info (a la Google Analytics) and try to figure out where my money is going. I don't know. I want to try Mint, but.. I just don't know. Paranoid.

Thanks..

 

[Lifeisabeach]

At home, we use iBank, which is a great Mac-native money manager. Not "quite" as fully featured as Quicken is, but they are getting there. We also use a freebie web-based service called Moneytrackin'. The reason for that one in particular is because they had an app for jailbroken iPhones that let you easily enter transactions as you made them. And since it was web-based, I could check in a pinch to see what the balance was and it would include any transactions my wife had made... no need to synchronize later at home and no worries about what the "real" balance was (so long we both used it properly). Essentially, Moneytrackin' served as a virtual checkbook register. Unfortunately, they've yet to release a native client for the iPhone.

Now iBank actually has similar functionality to Moneytrackin', but it requires a MobileMe account. What you do is upload their web-based app that comes with iBank to your iDisk, browse to it using Safari (or place a bookmark to it on your home screen), and punch in transactions as you make them. Later, you just sync the home computer to the iDisk. We are probably going to bite the bullet and get a MobileMe account and start using this instead ourselves.