Welcome to part five of our eight-part analysis of Mint.com. In the last post, we covered how to use the Budgets page. In this post, we take a closer look at Mint's Goals and Trends pages.

Goals

Clicking on the "Goals" link in the top navigation bar takes you to a page where you can set up a variety of savings goals. Below, you'll find more information on this page's functionality.

The goals page of the Mint.com site lets you set up savings goals. It comes stocked with a list of default savings goals including "Pay off Credit Card Debt," "Pay off Loans," "Save for an Emergency," "Save for Retirement", "Buy a Home," "Buy a Car," "Save for College," "Take a Trip," and "Improve My Home." You can also set up your own custom goals.

Setting Up a Goal

When you create a goal, Mint takes you through a three-step process. The first step asks you to give your goal a title, choose a category for your goal, and enter the amount you wish to save. The second step asks you to associate a financial account with your goal. You can choose to open a new financial account, use an existing account, or choose an account at a later time. Finally, step three asks you for the date you wish to reach your goal and calculates the monthly contribution necessary to meet your goal in time.

Goals Details Page

When you view your goals from the goals page, you get a status bar, or budget, for each goal. At a glance, this bar tells you how much you've saved towards your goal and whether you're ahead of schedule, behind schedule, or right on track.

Clicking on the "View Details" tab of any goal takes you to that goal's details page. Here, you'll see a rundown listing the goal amount, daily balance, planned date of completion, projected date of completion, and how much you've contributed towards the goal for the current month. You can also delete the goal, mark it complete, or add a task to be completed in association with the goal.

Trends

Clicking on the "Trends" button in the top navigation directs you to a page that provides useful data and analysis of your personal financial trends. Read more on this below.

The trends page allows you to get useful data on your spending and income history. This page is set up in three sections—set your timeframe, choose a graph, and get the report.

Set Your Timeframe

This section lets you define the time period of your report. You can select a single month, an entire year, or all time. You can also highlight and select a series of months.

Choose a Graph

This section asks you to select what you want to track and how you want to track it. You can choose to track spending, income, net income, assets, debts or net worth. You can track your selection over time, by category, by merchant, or by tag.

Once you've chosen what you want to track and how you want to track it, buttons in the upper right of this section let you visualize your results as a bar graph or pie chart. You can use the drop-down box next to those buttons to compare the results with your results from last year or the last three months. You can also compare your results with results from a specific city, state, or the entire United States.

Get the Report

For each graph or chart you generate, you'll see a report in the last section at the bottom of the page. Reports list the amounts you've spent, received, or netted by category. They also tell you which category had the highest dollar amount and which had the most transactions. You can also export a report to a CSV file for use in other applications.

This concludes part five of this eight-part series. Next time we'll take a look at Mint.com's Investments page.