Mint T-shirts (with a catch)

[Damon]

Ok, I have a lot of XL (extra large) shirts that I can give away (they would probably fit an xxl as well). Here's what folks have to do to score a free t-shirt:

a) Point a link to a favorite blog concerning personal finance matters in this thread

OR

b) Make a product suggestion in this thread

First ten to do so score a free t-shirt. Simply send me a private message when you're done with:

Name
Street Address

[curiousmi]

While not an actual personal finance blog, the site I find most of my finance advice and knowledge from is Consumerist.com (http://www.consumerist.com). In fact, they had a link to a review of this site that prompted me to join up.

As far as a product suggestion, I would say the most helpful thing for me would be an easy way to access the Mint.com (http://www.mint.com) website from a mobile phone, particularly the iPhone. I spent a large portion of my daily browsing time on my cell phone, so having a nicely-formatted site dedicated for mobile browsing would be awesome.

[ouden]

http://www.nevblog.com/

interesting blog tracking one young mans path to possible financial sucess

[tommyholczer]

http://biz.yahoo.com/pfg/e31funds/

I found this to be SUPER helpful in learning about Mutual Funds, and the basics to investing.

[Damon]

Thanks. I will try to send out the XL shirts today (got your private messages).

[Kohout]

Considering I live frugally, ie I'm cheap, my student loan payment tends to be one of my largest expenses. Would it be possible to open a sort of "quasi account" on Mint pertaining to my Direct Loan? So as to say, monitor my loan and payments directly through Mint to the loan department as opposed to through my bank account. Is this too abstract?

This product suggestion is in hopes of receiving a free t-shirt.

ps I didn't really intend for my product suggestion to come in the form of a question. Thanks!

[luchtcm]

Here's my favorite personal finance blog: http://www.pfadvice.com.

They've always got some quick, creative and helpful tips on saving money.

[tkef]

Product Suggestion:

It would be nice if I could include positive transactions within categories and Mint would subtract the total amount spent from that category. This is nice in cases where I buy something knowing I will be repaid and when I am repaid I post the Credit to that particular category and it cancels it out. This way I can track all activity going through a particular category and the proper total is reflected.

Thanks

[chese79]

I am a big fan of http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/ and http://consumerist.com/

[msd]

I really like these:
http://bostongalsopenwallet.blogspot.com/
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/
Actually I visit a lot more of these pf blogs on a daily basis in case anybody wants me to list more

[Ron]

#1 - fix bugs
#2 - fix duplicate transaction bugs in particular
#3 - split transactions!

-ron

[Damon]

Splits *might* be available in late November:)

Duplicates: should have gotten better after the 25th of October.

[Damon]

I got this batch of t-shirts out today.

Note: I had a returned shirt from a zip code of 02115. I can't read it because it looks like it got wet during delivery. If you asked for a shirt & haven't gotten one, please let me know.

[ouden]

thanks for the shir:)

[johnnybones]

:)Alchohol, wine, mixed drink purchases needs to come under social life. also tobacco (cigs, chew) purchases - Can influence some to quit. Especially for the young folk.. Can really help with tracking funds...

Already got the Mint Port Authority Golf Shirt - Love it!! Are there any Tee Shirts?

[nlinux]

I think the service is great to point. I have yet to be able to successfully add a bank account which is very annoying and basically makes my interest in using the service less likely. In order to make this less painful:

* Mint could allow manual account creation that is not tied automatic stuff.
* Most institutions allow .ofx or qif export, allow users to import the transactions for their manual accounts through these formats for the manual accounts.
* This process could also work for brokerage accounts as I know most of mine allow export in one of the 2 formats.

[Damon]

I am personally pushing for that stuff, believe me!

[dcharti]

I would love an API so developers can build externals tools. It would be great if, for example, I could have a Mint widget in my Mac OS X Dashboard that displays recent transactions, balances or budget information (it would also be great if Mint would find a dev to make this and keep it updated).

I also spoke with a developer earlier this week who would like access to a Mint RSS feed of personal transactions for manipulation and reconciling purposes.

[dcharti]

Also, if you're already out of the free shirts, I'd be happy to buy one too.

Though, obviously, I'll take free if I can get it.

[Damon]

Mailed today;-)

[mritz]

Suggestion,

Maintain a list of tags (like gmail) so I don't have toremember my tags and allow a "chart according to tag" option. Some of my expenses come from investment properties and I'd like to sort them.

I love the site btw. Can't wait for more updates.

[Damon]

Gotcha on the t-shirt!

[fred333]

That sounds like a very good suggestion.

[maxer]

i dont want a t-shirt cause i dont fit an XL, but here is my suggestion:

1. allow mint to follow account transfers

- the idea being that currently mint has no method for tracking the amount of money you are saving (the whole idea behind budgeting) and by tracking transfers to other accounts, this money would be the money you are saving each month, thereby allowing you to track how much you are saving each month!

2. expand categories and/or allow modification of categories to accommodate for personal differences or preferences.

- although mint does a fairly good job categorically, i still struggle at times to categorize something according to the predefined listings.

[Damon]

" 2. expand categories and/or allow modification of categories to accommodate for personal differences or preferences.

- although mint does a fairly good job categorically, i still struggle at times to categorize something according to the predefined listings."

I think this will be solved if we can make labels more useful (appear in spending trends, etc.)

[rhenrikson]

www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com
www.cleverdude.com
www.getrichslowly.com

I've already commented in the suggestion forums about some features I'm interested in:
1. Getting loans into mint (and giving you recommendations on how to consolidate/save money)
2. Ability to set goals in a 'virtual' savings account that you contribute money to. Similar to what's available at smartypig.com. Collaboration on a shared page with family/friends would be awesome.
3. Envelope budgeting (there are several large threads on this).

A new application I just saw today that I thought would be cool is cell phone minutes tracking. I just joined skydeck.com and they have a pretty cool tool that reads your phone bills (mint-style) and puts a toolbar in firefox showing you how many minutes you've used this month. It would be cool to be able to import this information into mint to track our phone bills (and catch problems *before* the kids go over).

It seems like it would align very well with how mint is already set up. Import phone bills, divide them into a pie chart showing who you call most (with contacts divided into categories - friends, coworkers, clients, etc), and show your monthly budgets for minutes/data/text messages. This would be a *killer* function to add to mint (granted it strays a little from the core product, but still very cool).

Of course, I think recommendations #1-3 above are more important for near-term implementation. Keep up the awesome product!

[jockeyjoc]

Hey I would love to have a shirt in small or medium!

[Damon]

Send me an email with:

Name
Size
Shipping address

:-)

[Cibyl]

Not sure if there are any shirts left, but I would love one if there are! :D

My suggestion (which I just brought up a part of in another thread) would be to add more date flexibility to Mint.com. Some examples of what I'm referring to:

1) On the "Transactions" page being able to search by date (March 17) or by date range (March 10-17) and only see the transactions that fall on/between those dates. I sometimes like looking at my week-by-week numbers and this would allow me to do it more easily.

2) On the "Trends" page be able to enter your own date ranges. Maybe I want to view my monthly expenses as being from March 10th to April 10th instead of March 1st to April 1st, or maybe I went on vacation for a whle and want to see where all of my vacation expenses were going without having to mark all of the transactions as being in the "Vacation" category.

[rachael24]

Any updates on the inventory of the shirts?

[Damon]

I put in a new request for inventory last week (been out of the office because of a death in the family). I will start getting out the shirts that I have the inventory on, then work on getting out the other shirts when the order comes in.