My Favorite Budgeting App Mint.com - What I Like

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll talk what I like about Mint.com -- my budgeting program of choice.  This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on how I use Mint.

The first video in this series gives an overview of how I use Mint.  In this video, I want to cover all of the things I like about Mint:

• Consolidation - prior to using Mint, I had an elaborate process by which I would log into both my bank and my main credit card website and export transactions from each.  Then I would put them all into a spreadsheet.  This required me to be at my laptop and would take some doing.  Plus there were inevitably duplicate transactions.  It was, in short, a pain in the rear.  Mint makes this process SO MUCH EASIER.  Once you establish a connection inside Mint with your bank account and credit card accounts, it seamlessly pulls in all your transactions each time you visit the webpage or open the app.   No elaborate export process, no duplicates.  And because this is such as easy process, I can stay more on top of my spending and my budget.  
• Mobile - This is basically a given these days, but it is SO NICE to have a mobile version of Mint -- I have it on both my iPhone and iPad.  The mobile app allows me to check my budgets and categorize transactions while I'm away from my computer.  So, instead of this being a chore that I need to do in my office once a week or a couple of times a month, it becomes something I can update easily throughout the week before I forget what purchases I've made and what they were for.  It also helps to be able to check my budgets on the fly when making purchase decisions.
• Transactions - Mint gives you a lot of flexibility to change transactions once you pull them in from your banking institutions. 
  • You can rename the vendor -- which is great since checks come in with the check number as the vendor name. 
  • You can add a note, which I use frequently.  For example, in this transaction where we took the kids tubing, I'll put a note in to remind myself of that since the vendor name is not very descriptive.  The more information the better if you are trying to examine and reduce your expenses. 
  • You can also add a transaction manually.  I don't use this often, but sometimes I use it to make sure I'm recording cash properly.  For example, when the kids "deposit" babysitting money with me.  I put in a manual transaction to record it as deposited into the Kids category and then transaction another to have me withdraw it for cash.  
  • You can create if/then statements that trains Mint to categorize your transactions properly.  For example, every time I get a transaction from the vendor Audible.com, I would like Mint to automatically categorize that into my personal account "Lara".  Once you enter a budget category that is different from their default rule, Mint gives you an option to create an if/then rule to categorize all similar transactions going forward.  This is only available on the web version, not mobile. 
  • You can split transactions.  Say $30 of my PeaPod purchase was for household goods and the rest was for groceries.  By hitting this Split icon, you can slice and dice this transaction into as many pieces as you want -- as long as they add up to the right total.  You can even trick Mint into doing the math for you if you add and delete line items.  And the last thing on transactions,
  • You can export transactions.  You can export all transactions by clicking on the link at the bottom of the transaction page.  You'll see this link at the end of the search results as well.  For example, if you search for every transaction where you spent $50, you can export just that data set.  I love this since, as you'll hear in the second part of this video, there is a lot that Mint doesn't do, so I appreciate the ability to pull all of the transactions into a spreadsheet so that I can run my own custom reports on them.  And the last area of what I like is
• Budgeting - I have some real issues with the budgeting function in Mint, but I like the basics.  You can create new budgeting categories, so you don't have to stick with their default categories -- that was a requirement for me.  On a computer (not the mobile app), you can see your budget by any month within the last year, you can choose All Time, This Year, or you can drag for a custom time period, like the last 3 months.  I like that it tells you your total budget and actual income and total budget and actual spending and calculates the difference.  I like the color coded. I also, LOVE that it puts all transactions that don't fall into one of your budgeted categories down at the bottom here until Everything Else.  That allows you to go back in to each of these and recategorize the transactions into a budget line item that you are current using.  So, that is quite a bit that I like about Mint! 

I'm pretty happy with the convenience and functionality that Mint provides, but I do have some complaints, which I'll be covering in my next video.  

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!