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Ryan Petersen's Blog

This post is not so much an economic analysis, as a review of a very interesting new source of economic data: the benchmarking tools provided tools by personal finance Web site Mint.com. In exchange for access to cutting edge expense tracking, budgeting and online finance tools, Mint's users provide the site with direct access too all their personal banking and investment accounts.

One of the tools that Mint offers allows you to compare your own spending habits with other Mint.com users in your area or nationwide.

These data reveal a severe collapse in consumer spending during October, to an extent that may have gone under reported in the media. Retail sales figures for September, which were only just released, have the L.A. times predicting gloom and doom. But according to Mint.com's data--accessed directly from the bank, credit card, and investment accounts of more than a million users--spending on "shopping" fell another 33% in October.

Users of the site across the United States spent an average of $686 on "Shopping" in Septembe, compared with just $456 in October. The site's data for November show that spending appears to have recovered, but how many businesses are really prepared for a 30% decline in revenue? Anybody loaded up with a lot of debt in a recent private equity transaction may be headed for trouble. And now is not the right time to try to borrow more money just to keep yourself afloat.

To see the Mint.com data for yourself, simply visit the site, sign up for a free account, then click on the Trends tab. Scroll to the bottom of that page to see the spending habits of Mint.com useres in the different regions. These data provide phenomenal economic insights.

Users of a site like this may tend to be young and maybe somewhat financially conservative (they are tracking all their expenses online, after all). What other sampling biases might built into the site's data? How would these biases skew the data?

Labels: data, economics