Mint sweetens the deal with investment tracking

Personal finance tracker mint.com, which picked up a "Best of Show" Tuesday at Finovate, has released its collection of investment tracking tools from closed beta.

The free personal-budgeting site, which also reports signing up its 500,000th user sometime in the past few days, thus adds a fancier set of financial-planning tools to its previous abilities to parse data from checking, savings and credit-card accounts. Mint CEO and founder Aaron Patzer describes the additions as making the site "more mainstream" -- and increasing its appeal to users over 35.

If you're one of the 500,000, the new tools function much as the old tools do -- once you've given the site the login information it needs to pull data from whichever bank, credit-card and (now) investment accounts you wish to monitor, Mint queries the various financial services daily and hauls over data at the end of each day detailing what your money's been up to.

The site lets you add IRAs, brokerage accounts, mutual funds, 401Ks and the like; at present, 200 different investment types are represented. The 401K management tools have a particularly nice feature for the chronically disorganized job-hopper: Tell the system where your account is and it'll check for other 401Ks you might have forgotten in the process of changing employers.

That 401K feature can save you money, notes Patzer. 401K maintenance fees are higher than most other investment fees -- one-half of one percent of the value, sometimes. Though Mint's still "read-only" as the company describes it, not allowing you to actually buy or sell from the site itself, it now offers an advice center that can tell you whether you'd be financially wiser to put that money into an IRA. The site can also analyze your 401K's performance to let you know if it's gaining value because you're a financial wizard, or just because you keep dumping in more money.

The investment tools went into private beta six months ago, and Patzer estimates that about 100 hours of usability testing factored into the process. End users accustomed to Mint's whizzy graphics tools will not be disappointed; the charts showing how your investments are performing relative to the market as especially clear and easy to parse. The drill-down's impressive as well. A look at the writer's own portfolio drilled down seamlessly to reveal at least one fund that wasn't pulling its weight long before the current crisis. And, as it does with bank accounts, Mint can flag fees that your brokerage firm was hoping would stay "hidden."

And isn't it great to roll out investment-monitoring tools just when most of us are shielding our eyes from the stock market? Patzer says that the current mayhem is reflected in recent site traffic: "Traffic's doubled. There's more checking -- and there's more budgeting."