Before I was content with having credit cards paid off, a nice savings, and slowly paying off other debt like low interest student loans and car loans. And the mortgage? Oh, I can pay that off eventually. But put baby into the equation and it ALL must be paid of NOW, not tomorrow, not next week, NOW I say!

So I began making my little list of goals and putting a timeline to them. But no matter how I finagle it, I am not happy. I want to have no remote possibility of slight financial stress that future baby could be exposed to. I don’t want to fight with my husband over it, I don’t want baby to ever feel the pressure of financial tension, and I want diamond encrusted toys for said baby! In short, I want more than could ever be attained while still fertile, and worse I seek a perfection that even an old, infertile millionaire cannot attain.

Now that I have my piles of scrap paper with charts and numbers and calculations that prove I am a crazed, delusional, perfectionist incapable of attaining my overly ambitious goals…I have come to phase two: acceptance of my inevitable failure at reaching my goals and wallowing in self-loathe at this fact. Hopefully tomorrow I will move onto phase three: slapping myself silly then coming up with a humanly feasible plan that leaves us in a “good” financial place instead of a “perfect” one.

Any advice from parents? How were you able to feel financially ready for a baby? Or am I crazy to think there is such a thing?

Mint.com is a website that allows you to track your financial accounts online. In order to use Mint you have to enter in your log in information for financial accounts (banks, credit cards, loans) into the website. There is some controversy about wether sharing your login passwords and security questions is a good idea or not. Of course, if the site was hacked, everyone using it would be in trouble. However, the same is true for any other website you shop with online. Getting past the worst-case-scenarios of identity theft, lets look at the site for it’s features.

Features I like:
• The design is great, I’m a sucker for all things slick and ajaxian.
• Trending. I like the ability to view pretty pie charts of where all my money is going. You can also easily set sliding date ranges for the pie charts.

• Budgets. You can set budgets for categories then the software auto-categorizes to tell you if you are over-spending on categories. Of course it shows you that you spent entirely too much on donuts last month in a pretty bar graph that is oh-so-slick and dynamic.
• Alerts. You can set up alerts that can send to you an email or text message to your phone when an account hits a set low, or when your bills are late, even if your interest rate changes.

The problem with Mint.com is that there is another site (the behind-the-scenes code for Mint) called Yodlee that is much more robust. Mint only has a limited number of financial institutes linked in and doesn’t have all my financial accounts available, whereas Yodlee has every single one. Yodlee lets me track and trend things with more accuracy and options. For all Mint’s slickness, it is a pain in the ass to edit a transaction’s category. And creating category rules that actually work, is also more cumbersome in Mint. Now, Yodlee can’t compete with Mint as far as design- the site is new and on the cutting edge of web apps. But when it comes down to my finances, I don’t want pretty. I want fast, usable, and robust querying of my data. So I’m sorry Mint, but your cute-as-a-button design just doesn’t make up for the features your big brother Yodlee offers.

Rating: 2.55 out of 5 stars