The Economy According To Mint

I don't use mint (long-time Quicken user), but it wouldn't surprise me at all if many married users of mint are couples or entire families. Nor would it surprise me for the average mint user to be in their late 30s, with fairly little representation among the just entering the workforce crowd.

Yes, that might introduce biases in their data that don't reflect with high fidelity the entire breadth of consumer actions, but even slightly imperfect data that's internally consistent can be quite valuable.

"Overall, the mean household income in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau 2004 Economic Survey, was $60,528"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

To be fair he might have been displaying the median income and husbands and wives might have separate mint.com accounts, although I would be surprised if the typical behavior was to divide the cars and mortgage between two accounts.

Edit: looks like sokoloff and I thought the same thing at the same time

The data is likely limited in scope by more than just income. For instance, its a web-based startup. This means that users of it are more likely to be tech savvy. It also means that the users are younger, which gives the baby boomers a weaker representation.

Mint is also a money management site, so by it's very nature it's users are interested in properly managing their money. People who care about proper money management are probably doing a better job of making/saving/investing it.

My life experience is limited (I'm only 24) but from it I can say with confidence that the majority of people in my community, family, school, etc are not tech savvy, don't worry about managing money, and frankly most still believe that if you can't buy the software at bestbuy or walmart it's not made by a reputable company.

I completely agree. They claim this is a 'quantitative' analysis, but it's really anecdotally describing a graph. They should have removed seasonal variations, used a larger data set, and tried a couple time series models. Maybe in a couple years, when they actually have more data, it will be more meaningful.

By 'agencies' I assume you mean government agencies; and by "gathered/guessed/invented" I assume you mean government agencies are wildly inaccurate. Citation needed.