Stay Alert

Mint.com does such a good job of summarizing your overall “financial health” on the Overview page that you may sometimes forget to dive down into the details of individual accounts and examine your data for unusual activity. It can become too easy to just view your current cash balance and credit card debt totals and forget to poke around in the actual transactions.

Fortunately, Mint.com is a vigilant tool, and it looks for transactions in your accounts that don’t fit with your normal routine. It’s also constantly looking at your expenditures and comparing them to any budget you may have created. (You learn about Budgets next in Lesson 8, “Budgets.”) But for Mint.com to maintain a careful watch over your financial life, you must first instruct Mint.com on how you want it to perform these duties and when to alert you.