Managing Budget using Mint.com

[caption id="attachment_157" align="alignright" width="300"] Managing Budgets with Mint[/caption]

For a long time, we suffered from an 'inconsistent month-to-month spending' problem. Some months, we would spend more, and some months we would spend less. It was not because we had a bad spending habit, but because certain large bills did not come every month or at pre-determined times. After trying a few things, we settled on Mint.com as a way of tracking our spending, and more importantly, getting the big picture view.

We used to use credit card for all our expenses except for utility bills and places like Costco that don't accept credit cards. We used to pay off the entire monthly credit card balance in full. However, credit card billing cycles never matched our bank's monthly statement cycles. Due to this inconsistency, we were not able to consistently track our monthly spending as it ended up being a lot of manual work. Then, we figured that tracking would be easier if we only used a debit card for all our expenses. We tried that for a while, but doing it manually in Excel spreadsheet was still a lot of pain.

Then, we decided to use Mint. Mint pulls all your financial accounts into one place. It allows you to set a budget, track your goals, and track all your expenses in an easy-to-use interface. I had known about Mint for a while, but always felt a bit uncomfortable because it requires user name and password of bank and credit card companies in order to link them to Mint. Gradually, after a lot research and reading information about privacy and security process at Mint, I convinced myself to open up an account with Mint.

The set-up process was very easy and took ONLY a few minutes to get started. Immediately, we set up spending categories such as Utilities, Shopping, Automobiles, Food & Dining etc. Then we set up monthly budgets for each of these categories. After the set up process was complete, our job was simply to monitor transactions, categorize them (if not done automatically or incorrectly done), and review the trends of our spending. Mint also automatically emails us weekly reports of how we performed with respect to our budgets during that week.

Mint has made this process so seamless and automatic that we focus simply on tracking and getting the big picture. My wife and I review our trends together at least once a month and vising Mint has almost become a ritual for us. Another indirect advantage of this tool is that it facilitates conversations about money between the two of us. As a result of these conversations, we are planning for large ticket items ahead of time. In summary, Mint is a great tool for getting control of your expenses and budgets.