Quicken Buys Mint.com Online Accounting Startup

Quicken bought Mint.com, which is a (currently) free online financial tool.

http://www.mymoneyblog.com/archives/2009/09/intuit-makers-of-quicken-buy...

What is Mint.com?

1. It will automatically track your investments, including buys/sells, and can download all recent account information from most of your online banking institutions, so you no longer manually have to enter each sale/dividend/posting (supposedly).

2. I don't know about a direct Turbotax import, but Mint.com can export all your transactions of a particular account as a downloadable .csv/excel file, I am sure there are other formats.

3. Most banks have a BillPay feature, even local banks in Pittsburg, KS, so I don't think that would be much of something Quicken would care to ever support anymore anyway.

My guess is, Quicken will begin to roll out their new services online, under the guise of Mint.com (integrated) as paid upgrades through that site, here on out, and steadily drop support for personal computer software. Or another direction is, they could just let Mint.com fail, which would force people to use their current more advanced online accounting service, thus eliminating their competition. I ran into this problem a little while ago, I track my personal finances and LLC through, still, QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac, most of that I had brought in, was from carefully kept Quicken data I'd had for years, and I basically just use Mint.com for anything that I'd like to be able to view online, essentially as an online consolidated account summary, of what I choose to see and what those banks/brokerages, or individual investment companies, have available online already anyway.

Bahumbug! I refuse to ever do any banking online!

Sadly, even though you may be consider yourself "immune" because you may not currently do any online banking, investments, or accounting, you'll find that when you go to setup most initial online account services with any bank or brokerage, all you (or a hacker) needs is your account number and the last four of your social security number and you (or anyone else for that matter) would have instant access to all of your banking information online immediately. It's not something I can worry about anymore, because I know that my financial info is only as secure as my institution keeps it (not very), regardless of what you do about it. There's not an option to "opt out" anymore, it's all there and it's all available online already. If the bank teller is a snoop, or they're sloppy with their security, it's as accessible to them, as it is to anyone else online.

Just one last note as well, I have read this regarding online identify theft; it's often better to go in and setup an online account with different passwords and different information than the default (typically the last four digits of your social security number), and never use it, rather than leave it all with your standard known information. At least that way, you have made the conscious effort to lock anyone else out of your financial data. This may seem counterproductive to most people, but its one small step I would recommend to the even the most defiant online banking hold-out.

This advice is being provided as a courtesy, no guarantee of results written intended or implied.