I have to admit I’m still really enjoying Mint.com. For the first time in many years, I’m tracking my actual expenses against my budgeted expenses. The reason I’m doing this is because Mint has made it so easy. As long as we use our credit or debit cards for purchases, they all automatically download in to Mint and are assigned in to the right category. Mint does a great job of correctly assigning each expense to the right category. I have had to change less than 10 items total.
What I really like is the “overview” screen that you see when you log in. I have added a bunch of bars that show what I’ve budgeted each month for various expenses and Mint slowly fills in the bars as we spend money. It’s a quick and easy way to see how we are doing each month and takes no effort at all. Every time I have ever tried to use Quicken or MS Money, I’ve failed because of the amount of effort it took to keep the data current. I’m guessing that those programs have improved a lot since I last checked them out so I’m sure you can probably do most of this in Quicken now but I’ll take the free online option.
The only complaint that I have about Mint at this point is that it doesn’t support manually adding in assets. A friend of mine, who is also using Mint, sent an email to the company and they replied that is in the works and we should look for some additional functionality in the next month or so. I’ll be waiting…….
On a completely unrelated note:
I’ve been enjoying the fading coverage of the financial crisis. I definitely spend too much time reading the news online and find myself feeling overloaded with concern about where we are headed. Make no mistake though, I’m still concerned. What I am doing is reading enough of it that it keeps a little bit of fear in my head. Every time I think about buying something new (like the Dell Mini 9 Inspiron), I do a bit of a reality check and it usually dampens the enthusiasm for the purchase. Luckily my wife and I are savers already so all we’ve done is increase the amount we are saving. As we get closer to our savings goal, we’ll slack off a bit on that.
And on another note:
It seems like we’ve been doing a lot of grocery shopping lately. That might explain why our food budget is $17 over for the month. The good news is that we may be a bit over budget for October, but we’ve got lots of food to get us through the end of the month and beyond. We’ve been taking advantage of sales and coupons this month which has helped us stretch our food budget further. All that being said, with the extra work of looking for the sales and clipping the extra coupons, I think we are still spending about the same amount on food that we have over the last couple years, due to increasing food prices. I actually saw a 24 pack of Pepsi for $16. Are you kidding me? I don’t think I’ve ever paid full price for a case of soda before and I definitely won’t start now. We are actually trying to reduce our soda intake for better health and to save some money. Now seems like as good a time as any to quit buying it. $16? Geez.
I’ve been obsessed with my dwindling accounts and bad news with the economy too. I just need to stop reading the headlines!
Seems like the financial crisis coverage stepped up a notch today with the word recession. I agree – best to avoid excessive anxiety, but use financial news as a swift reality check as needed. My family has been replacing soda with homemade iced tea since July, we have cut out an average of $25 on our monthly food budget!
Mint is an awesome tool. My only complaint is that it’s a little hard to get everything set up, and then having to correct some purchases can be a bit timely. Overall though, it’s great to have an automated budget report of sorts.
I haven’t tried mint before, but I appreciate the reference. I’ll take a look into it. I feel the same concern. I’m worried that our economy is still headed in a downward direction even though the stock market jumped big time yesterday.