Mint.com, a US-based online personal finance service, today launched a product upgrade. It has claimed that the new features make financial planning easy for Mint.com’s million-plus users. Improvements include upgraded budgeting tools and sixteen new graphs, customizable expense categorization, and the ability to track and budget separately for business versus personal expenses.
These features are expected to help users increase retirement savings by quantifying the savings they can achieve, by transferring balances from dormant 401ks to lower-cost IRA’s. It has been reported that the service now connects automatically to more than 8,000 financial institutions – from banks and credit card companies, to brokerages and credit unions, and represents over half of all FDIC-insured institutions in the US.
Aaron Patzer, CEO and founder, said: More than 90% of our users have already made changes to their spending and savings habits because of what they’ve learned by using Mint.com. Nearly 50% of our users tell us that since signing up, they’ve been able to set and stick to a budget for the first time. We’re working hard to grow that to 100%.
We estimate that our typical user would have an additional $65,000 in savings at retirement if they moved an inactive 401k account into a Rollover IRA. It’s a painless way to significantly increase retirement savings and, possibly, maintain the retirement date and lifestyle they had planned before last year’s market collapse, he added.
