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actyourwageSo 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?
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?