First Impressions of Mint.com’s New “Financial Fitness” Feature

August 16th, 2009

This weekend Mint.com gave me (and others?) a first look at their newest feature called “Financial Fitness” which is currently in beta test. After several hours of exploring, I figured I’d weigh in and give a review. My verdict can be summed up as: mostly good.

A Quick Walk Through the Features

In brief, Financial Fitness is a sort of game that assigns users points for completing tasks. Each task is designed, in one way or another, to improve your financial strength. The tasks can be as simple as reviewing your weekly spending, to much more time consuming tasks like reviewing your credit report.

A few of the tasks are based on the honor system and a few of the tasks are automatically detected by Mint. For example, there’s no way for Mint to know if I’ve got health insurance, so I clicked a button that says “complete” and Mint gave me the points for the month. It is particularly impressive when Mint automatically detects certain tasks: avoiding bank fees, coming in under budget, avoiding finance charges, etc.

The tasks are grouped based on the five pillars that can be leveraged to build long-term personal financial strength: know your money, spend less than you earn, use debt wisely, invest in your savings, and prepare for the unexpected. The tasks are also grouped according to how frequently they should be completed: annually, monthly, or weekly.

Click the image above for a screen shot of the entire game in a new window.

What I Like

The game is intuitive. The concept of turning your financial strength into a “game” is very innovative. Although I could be wrong, I don’t think other personal finance software packages (Quicken, Wesabe, Yodlee, etc.) offer this functionality.

Financial Fitness has brought out a little competition from within me. So far, I am highly motivated to make sure I get a high score month-to-month. Unfortunately for Mint, I am not motivated enough by the game to consider changing any products through their “Ways to Save” feature. In the short-run, I think this is more of a feature to attract new customers and build a more immersive experience for existing customers than it is a money-maker for the company.

All-in-all, the game is easy to use and as close to “fun” as managing your finances can get.

What Needs Improvement

Although Financial Fitness gets a solid thumbs up from me, there are definitely opportunities for improvement. For starters, some customers might object to Mint scrutinizing their data in a new way and an opt out setting might be appropriate. I’ve never had any concerns with how Mint uses my data in the aggregate, but I can certainly understand how some users might find this to be overly intrusive. After all, if people find the ads in Gmail intrusive, they are definitely not going to be happy with Mint. My own personal take: as users of Mint.com we are trusting the company to always keep our data secure. I am personally comfortable with them automatically slicing and dicing my own data to help me out.

Also, I do not have all of my accounts in Mint so it is impossible for Mint to automatically analyze tasks like: save a 3 month emergency fund and save money each month. Unfortunately, these two tasks are not on the “honor system,” so I will end up missing points each month even though “in real life” I have these tasks complete.

Currently, there is no way to compare your score against other Mint users. If there was a leader board and a way to share your score (without compromising your security, of course) it would make this game much more interesting. The community participation is what makes Wesabe such a great tool. This is also an area where Mint can improve.

Lastly, I have a few design issues with the interface. Mint has designed the game using their branded shades of green. Unfortunately, outstanding tasks and completed tasks are too close in color for me to easily and quickly discern.

Closing

I’m grateful to have an advanced look at this new functionality–thanks, Mint!! As the game progresses in the months to come, I’ll continue to keep an eye on it and review changes as they crop up. What’re your thoughts on the game? Any outstanding questions? Ask in the comments and I’ll follow up.

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