What I have learned about using Mint.com for great justice.

[sapote]

So in June I joined Mint.com on a whim. In theory, since I've started using it, I'm doing much better on budgeting - I mean, I actually set budgets and feel kinda bad when I overstep them - but it handily tracks net income and mine has been $-13 a month since June. Which means I am actually still living on that unexpectedly big tax return last year, not my income.



What Mint can do: If you give it your information for online banking with your bank, it can import all your information about your daily transactions and make pretty, pretty graphs for you. It will let you use handy sliders to set a budget. It will track your credit card debt and student loans. It will save your information for past months and make bar graphs out of trends. Did I mention graphs? I ... I like graphs.

It will also try to sell you credit cards. Also, if you have reasonable privacy concerns, it is probably not for you, despite all the various security stamps.

So. Here are some things that Mint doesn't do that are important if you're using it for budgeting:

1) It does email you if you go over budget. It tells you your income and your projected income but that's it as far as keeping your budget within those lines; you can set your clothing budget to a hundred thousand dollars for March and it will not at any point ask how you're planning to pay for that, though it will totally note that you're not going to be saving any money. I can't decide if this is "not patronizing the customer" or "cleverly increasing the number of customers who will click on the credit-card offers".

2) It just sets a budget for a category for the month, like "Groceries, $200, March". I have a complicated five-part budget because I have subleasers and the overall rent is bigger than my paycheck; every month is a complicated tango in which certain quantities have to be certain places for certain amounts of time. Mint just lets you set your budget for the whole month; I'm still using an Excel spreadsheet to actually figure out if I'm in over my head week by week.

3) My bank shows transactions that are pending. Mint does not. If a check is going to bounce, Mint will tell me after the fact that I got charged an overdraft fee, but it's no substitute for balancing my checkbook. Unfortunately. I'm really bad at balancing my checkbook.

4) In theory, you can tell Mint that you're going to need blah amount of money for something in June, and it will set a savings goal for each month. I have had zero luck making this work.

So it's not a substitute for paying attention as things happen, it's just a handy data-gathering device if you're like me and fail at tracking expenses independently and need to know what the overall numbers look like after the fact (holy crap, I spent as much on sandwiches as I did on my part of my rent. That kind of thing.). What I've started doing is setting the date of the first paycheck of the month to month/01/2010, because there is a handy "net income" chart that was previously useless because my paycheck is always on the 30th, so my net income was always negative until the end of the month. Now I can watch the "net income" bar tick downward, sandwich by sandwich.

I hope this is useful to someone. So far I've learned that my budget reflects that I am a sandwich snob, and that having subleasers makes banking a three-ring circus type experience. Augh, subleasers.

Has anyone else any tips on budgeting software/websites? Anything anyone's using that works better?

Comments

[jamethiel]

Hi, welcome! Good to hear from you.

It's good to know about Mint, although I am dubious about selling credit cards. Does it work for people outside the US?

(I have to say, my experience with debt and getting out of it the hard way has made me extraordinarily resistant when it comes to credit card advertising. My bank offered me a limit increase because of my "excellent payment record". I laughed as I shredded it)

For me, I use an excel spreadsheet that jarrow made for me. I'm pretty lucky in that I get paid fortnightly--I have my expenses worked out. If they're coming out of my bank account in the next week, it stays in my bank account. If it's going to be longer than a week, it goes into my savings account--takes a week to clear, then a business day to access so I can't impulse spend.

I add up my expenses (monthly ones divided in two) and add a fudge factor for savings/emergencies. That gets withdrawn into my savings account. My regular payment goes on my credit card and if there's anything left it gets divided in three. One part goes to my home saving account (there's almost $200 in there! And I can't access it) the other goes on my credit card and the third either gets transferred to savings if I don't have anything on or I take it out in cash.

That way I know--if I have cash, I can spend it. If not, I don't touch it. I'm generally pretty good about not spending it. I have a first date tomorrow--he's said he'll pay (insisted on it. Whatever, I'm paying next time) but I've got $50 in case it all goes horribly pear-shaped and I need to get away in a hurry. If I turn out not to need to spend it, I'll buy a book with half of it and the other half is going into savings.

The spreadsheet does have it's drawbacks. It's not automatic, you HAVE to update it. But doing that every day means you know how much money you have and how much you're going to need and what you can spend. It's a way of keeping finances in mind. Occasionally I fail, and if it's a couple of days before month's end I just start afresh with the new month.

[ambar]

I believe Mint is not set up to work with non-North American banks.

I had no trouble setting up a budget for my farrier spending ($x every other month), so I can testify that bit works.

Agree it's not a substitute for Quicken. But I too like the pretty graphs. :)