Mint.com users feeling the hurt, pinching pennies

October 6, 2008 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

Personal finance site Mint.com has gathered data showing that its users spent an average of $300 less per month in August than in January this year — a 6 percent drop suggesting that the site’s 500,000 users are adjusting to the economic downturn (at least a little better than Wall Street).

Anonymous data culled from free finance sites like Mint, Geezeo and Wesabe that allow users to track their bank balances, set budgets, and control different types of spending, may become good barometers for how the daily lives of regular people are influenced by tough economic times. Early members on these relatively new sites are likely to be younger and more tech-savvy than the average American, but this could change as more people turn to web tools to help them cut costs and weather the storm.

In particular, Mint.com users spent about 1 to 3 percent less per month on entertainment, shopping and travel expenses, which is not surprising. Neither is the sharp 4 percent monthly drop in spending on gifts and donations. Discretionary spending is always the first to go. These changes were countered by a small 2 percent uptick in spending on both gas and utilities and financial advising.

The site will continue to pull data on a regular basis to keep tabs on how the recession is affecting its use.

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Photo of Camille Ricketts

About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Ted
    I like mint.com because they can afford a REAL domain name, and a short one with meaning!
  • I wonder how much Mint had to pay to get the domain name. Was it a savvy financial decision?
  • "But today’s announcement of acquisition of Mint.com domain does show that the startup has strong financial backing. Any such transaction would have costed the startup anywhere between $50K to $200K."

    Source: http://startupsquad.com/2007/05/23/mymintcom-ac...
  • Camille,

    While comparing to this past January is interesting, I'd be more interested in seeing a comparison to September 2007. Is it natural for spending to ebb in the month of September compared to January? After all, January does follow up the the holiday season, while thru September its likely people are saving and preparing for the season.

    Correlation is not causation is all... Likely it could be the recession causing this, but it could also be normal fluctuation throughout the year. The recession shouldn't give us tunnel vision. I'm no financial expert, and thus this analysis would be considerably more meaningful if the comparison were made to previous year trends in Mint for the same period. Does anyone have insights in regard to this?

    Regards,
    Matt Bidinger
  • joe
    Oh snap that data is now a gold mine for them.

    Does it say in their legal policy you agree to allow us to sell your data? Not one user specifically, but cumulative?
  • anon
    i believe mint is leasing the domain from the owners (ny PE guys iirc) for hefty cash and a small equity stake (again, iirc). heard about the deal long ago, don't remember the exact particulars.
  • Liem
    500,000 users ... I think they exaggerated this number. Based on the auto increment id I received, the best they have is 100,000 users.

    When a company that releases financial information lies, you know where it is heading. The government will knock on their doors.
  • http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mint.com/

    Our user count just shy of 500,000. We eclipsed 100,000 users in 2007 and 300,000 users in June '08.

    I feel the domain name was a great purchase as it is immediately easy to communicate to others verbally without explaining the spelling, i.e. Amazon, Apple, etc. It's also a subtle reinforcer of credibility and stability, especially important in the financial sector. Purely from a brand name perspective, I liken it to Staples, as it suggests the category (a mint prints money) without being literal and thereby generic, and it's iconic.
  • Edit: See Jasons comment below, as he clarified what the numbers mean. This post is a misinterpretation.

    So to Clarify, by "user count" they are talking unique visits. So Liem's user ID may reflect an approximate number of people who have registered, while the 500K number indicates the number of theoretical unique visits they are getting.

    I say theoretical, because compete.com only estimates a sites userbase. They do some "sciency" stats things like try to normalize and account for demographics and such. In reality still, their results are an estimate inferred from compete.com users who report usage through a toolbar and an amalgamation of "ISP Partnership" data.

    While competes numbers may be accurate or may be off the wall, its hard to tell in which direction they err and I do not see any statement of a confidence interval in their numbers. They are somewhat like Alexa and Quantcast, so the data should be given as much weight as one would put in either of those sources. I'd say, if they are up to 100K registered users then 500,000 unique visits is either overly modest or Mint has a fairly phenomenal conversion rate.

    All things considered, I'd think compete has improved somewhat since 2006, when a prominent Googler blogged about underwhelming results:
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-compete/
  • I was only offering compete as an independent data point as Liem was questioning the honesty of our PR. I work for Mint and I know that's how many users we have. As for Liem's "auto-increment ID" I do not know what this is, Mint users use their email addresses to log in.
  • Gotcha, well that makes more sense now. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.

    Off topic: Disqus is great. I'd love to see it, IntenseDebate, and/or Friendfeed find even more pervasive usage. It's a great way to find more cool content - Jason commented in his blog on an article by Alexander Vanelsas which had some interesting perspective.
  • Mint.com is the most informative and helpful financial planning site on the web today. Much better than Intuit and more interactive.

    Another site I really like is http://www..chillmybills.com.
  • Mint.com is the most informative and helpful financial planning site on the web today. Much better than Intuit and more interactive.

    Another site I really like is http://www.chillmybills.com.
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
    http://www.abercrombiefitchstore.co.uk