Mint.com launches new bill reminder feature

Stay on top of upcoming bills with email or text message reminders from Mint

In the age of automatic bill pay, it’s pretty hard to be late on a payment, but for those of us who fail to stay on top of our monthly budgets, sometimes it’s just a matter of making sure the money is actually there.  For those people (solidarity!), and anyone else who doesn’t want to lose track of bills, Mint.com has just launched a new bill reminder feature that keeps track of your bills and reminds you when the next one is due.

The new feature allows Mint users to see an easy-to-understand timeline of bill due dates, which is great for those of us who live paycheck-to-paycheck and need that kind of visualization to see how much time we have left before the crunch comes on.  The site does most of the grunt work for you by identifying items that look like bills based on monthly spending patterns (payments that go out every month at the same time), but users can also manually enter bills for which they want email or text message reminders.

Of course, automatic bill pay would seem to make this feature a little redundant, so what’s the point?

“It’s about organization,” said Mee-Sun Yuk, Product Manager of Intuit Personal Finance Group.  “It allows you to see all of your bills in one place and stay on top of your finances.”

Organization was something Group Product Manager Barb Chang echoed when asked about how Mint is staying on top of the multitudes of competitors emerging in the personal finance space, like ReadyForZero.com and LearnVest.

“A lot of those competitors are taking advantage of specific needs like getting out of debt.  Mint is more comprehensive.  We offer features for budgeting, getting out of debt, and organizing.  We have a very simple and easy to use site, and having simple view of your finances is very useful,” she said, adding: “People are trying to organize their finances.  We get a large spike of new users around New Years time.   They’re making resolutions and they want to get their finances in order.”

Mint.com is also appealing to a broader range of users these days.  In its earlier days, said Chang, Mint was oriented more towards younger males who had a higher net worth.  Today, the male-to-female ratio is more even and the average user is in their 30s. 

The new bill reminder feature can be accessed on the Mint.com website.  The company is currently working on its iPad application, which should be out by the end of the year.