Mint Now Offering Help Achieving Your Goals
June 29, 2010 - Personal finance site, Mint, has just released a new section of the website labeled "Goals" designed to help users reach their financial goals. Whether it is getting out of debt, buying a new home, or saving for retirement, Mint can now help you save money for your financial goal. Simply enter the information that it asks for such as number of years until the goal must be met, how much you want to set aside each month, etc., and Mint will work with you and your accounts to get the goal accomplished.
At the moment, there are only nine preset goals you can choose from, however that will hopefully increase as Mint receives feedback from its users. The goals that are included are fairly wide-ranging and include: getting out of debt, saving for an emergency, saving for retirement, buying a home, buying a car, saving for college, taking a trip, improving your home, and a "custom goal" option.
I tried setting up a goal to "Save for an Emergency" to test out the service. I was easily able to enter in my average monthly spending, as well as how many months I wanted to plan for. I then could tell Mint when I wanted to achieve the goal by and it told me I would need to save x amount of dollars each month to be prepared for a six month emergency by a certain date. It was easy to use and I think that seeing my goals on my homepage will hopefully increase my effort for saving for them.
