Money Planning Series: #2 How Mint Helps Us Budget

Disclaimer: I’m not sponsored or compensated in any way by Mint.com. These opinions are all my own.

Mint.com is one of the popular tools out there to help people manage their budgets and plan their finances. We’ve been using it for 10+ years and have incorporated into our Excel-based budgeting system. And, the best part is, it is free!

Essentially, Mint is a way to connect all of your financial accounts in one location so you can get a comprehensive look at your financial status at a glance. Mint has a variety of features built into the site that help with tracking bills, setting financial goals, managing investments, analyzing savings and spending trends, and checking your credit score.

We have used many of these features, but I’ll focus today on how we use Mint to manage our budget. The first thing to do is to log in and link views of each of your financials accounts to Mint. By linking views of each of your accounts (e.g., savings, checking, investments, debts, etc.) and listing your assets (like real estate or vehicles), you can see your net worth.

NOTE: You are not able to manage any accounts through Mint, only view them. So you can’t transfer money from your savings account to your checking account, but you can see transactions in and out of each account.

To align Mint with our Excel-based budgeting system, I then created a “budget” for each virtual envelope we use and set a monthly amount to be spent within each. Then, as each transaction posts to one of our financial accounts, it shows up in the global list of transactions. I can sort through the transitions and assign each of them to one of the “budgets.” The best part is, I can establish rules that automize a lot of this by auto-assigning purchases from certain vendors to particular categories (e.g., Wegmans purchases are always classified as groceries). It’s to the point now that I can quickly scroll through the list of monthly transactions and just double check that it’s right in a matter of minutes.

As an aside, I used to sort through receipts from big-box stores and split transactions among multiple categories (e.g., part of a Costco transaction would fall under groceries and the remaining portion household goods). I’ve moved away from this because it was too time consuming and our spending wasn’t variable enough that we were changing our spending. I now put all of the Amazon, Target, Costco, etc. purchases into one generic shopping category.

Now, you may be asking, isn’t the act of having what Mint calls “budgets” with set spending and savings amounts that you track over time essentially a budget? Well, yes. You could exclusively use Mint for your budgeting purposes and be completely set. My Excel-based budgeting system came first though, so I’ve incorporated Mint into my system. I like my system better for tracking savings though.

I use Mint as a shortcut and grab totals. For instance, I take the total monthly amount spent listed in Mint for each virtual envelope (what Mint calls “budget”) and put that number into my Excel-based budget file. Back in the day, I would enter each receipt total manually in Excel, which would take a significant amount of time. Using Mint has saved me at least an hour a month.

I think I’ll leave it there for now. I highly recommend checking out Mint to see if it will benefit you and meet your money management needs. If you have specific questions, let me know!

Photo by Abby Boggier on Unsplash