My Favorite Budgeting App Mint.com - A Tutorial

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll give you a quick tour of the program that I use for budgeting, Mint.com.   This is the first of a 3 part series on how I use Mint.

I’ve been compulsively keeping a budget since I was in college.  My parents made it a mission to spend as little money as possible when i was growing up, so I guess some of that rubbed off on me.   I'm also someone who loves systems, tracking things, and data -- so budgeting is a natural fit for me.  

Obviously, the technology has improved a lot in 25 years. My favorite software used to be Microsoft Money, but they phased that out years ago, which is when I switched over to Mint.com.  Mint has some real advantages and some annoying drawbacks, but having tried many of the alternatives, I’m convinced it’s the best thing out there at the moment for my needs.  I have two separate videos where I share my likes and dislikes, but first let me tell you why I need a tool like Mint. 

I use Mint for budgeting.  I don’t use it to pay bills, I don’t use it to keep track of my investments, and I don’t use it to track or pay down debt.  I only use it for monthly and annual budgeting.  If you are looking for information on any of those other functions, you are not going to find it here.  For me, here what Mint does in a nutshell. It:

• Takes all of the transactions from your checking and savings accounts and all of your credit cards and creates read only connections with each of these accounts.  It then
• pulls in and consolidates all of your transactions in a single place
• allows you to categorize each transaction with the proper budget category
• allows you to create a budget
• does budget reporting by month or by a custom time interval
• allows you to export all of your transactions so that you can manipulate them outside of mint in a spreadsheet

Let’s go through these one at a time.  First, Mint

Consolidates Accounts:

I have a checking account and a money market account with my bank, a credit card that I use frequently, and a couple of other store credit cards like Target and Old Navy.  I have online access to all of these accounts, meaning that I can log into the website for each account and see all of my transactions.

Mint has you choose your banking institution, enter your login credentials — and then it pulls all of the transactions in so that you can see them all in one place. Mint has a uni-directional relationship with those financial institutions, meaning it can pull info, but can’t make any changes.  It's kind of like having read access without being able to edit.  It makes me slightly nervous to give my bank login info to Mint, but so far they have been careful with that information. I’m obviously choosing convenience over security here, but I understand why many people would be squeamish about doing that.  If you have any problems connecting to your accounts, I have found customer service to be helpful if you don’t mind using online chat.   Mint also allows to you hide certain accounts.  For example, my kids both have savings accounts that are hooked into my account at the bank.  Since I don't want to see the transactions from those accounts, I’m able to hide them under account editing.

When you log into Mint, you'll start at the overview page, which is made up of a bunch of panels -- Mint calls them Cards.  There is the requisite advertising panel.  All of the others you can choose to hide by clicking on the gears icon and picking Hide Card.   The Accounts panel is on the left hand side.  Once all of your accounts are connected to Mint, you can click on any individual account to see only the transactions for that account.  Clicking on an account will take you to the Transactions page.  This is where you can choose All Accounts and see all of your transactions together, which is what I normally do.  Let's talk a bit about

Transactions

Here is the info that Mint pulls in for each transaction: date, vendor, amount, and the account where the transaction happened. You can change the vendor name for viewing without overriding the original data.  I do this frequently since, for example, Mint lists the check # as the vendor name and I'd prefer to have the actual vendor name.  You can also change the date of the transaction, add a note, and add tags to pull up certain kinds of transactions quickly.  Also, Mint will attempt to assign a category based on some basic rules, but you can change that default category.  You can also split a transaction and apply multiple categories.  So, what are categories used for?  They are used for

Budgeting

If you go into the Budgets tab, Mint has put in some default budgets for you to get started.  This isn't a video on budgeting.  Perhaps I'll do one solely about setting up a budget later.  Let's just assume that you are coming into this process either with a budget or with a good idea of how to set one up.  

First a weird thing on Mint's nomenclature.  They refer to each of the line items that make up a budget as a "Budget."  So, when you "Create a Budget" -- what you are really doing is setting up one line item in your budget.  Like $150 for gasoline per month. 

You can delete any of the budgets that Mint has already set up for you.  For example, I do not need a separate Alcohol & Bars budget - so I go hover over it, choose Edit Details and select Delete this budget.  I can also make changes to the amount budgeted right from the main screen.  I can change this $300 Gas & Fuel budget to $150.  

If you want to put in a new budget line item, choose Create a Budget and it'll ask you for a Category.  Hitting the arrows to the right of the field shows you the Catgories and Subcategories that already exist by default.  The good news is that you are not limited to the categories that already exist in Mint -- you can add new ones.  The bad news is that they don't let you delete any of their default categories, so categorizing can be a bit tedious.  Let's make a new category called Auto Other -- a catch all for oil changes, toll fees, and other car related expenses.  I want this to be grouped in the Auto & Transport, then I'm going to hit Add/Edit Categories . . . All of the subcategories for Auto & Transport are listed here.  I'll enter my new subcategory and now it is listed here under Your Categories.   Now that I have that, I choose how often the budget will be replenished -- every month is usually the best bet, and the amount in the budget —I’ll do $80.

Now, as I review my transactions for the month, I have to make sure that each transaction is assigned a category that also has a budgeted line item. 

You can view your budget for the month -- the default view is the current month.  Or you can choose a previous month or a range either by choosing the link for This Year or All Time, or by dragging your cursor over your preferred time-frame.  For example, doing this shows the last 3 months.   Mint has a great feature that shows you all of the transactions that have been categorized with anything outside of your budget.  Every transaction has to have a category -- Mint won't save it unless it has something in that field.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the budget page, you'll see Everything Else, clicking on any of these categories (or even any of the budgeted categories) will bring you to a list of the transactions that make up that total.  You can re-categorize transactions right from this page.  

From the Budget view, you can see how much you have budgeted for income and how much you have budgeted to spend.  You can also see a total of how much income you actually brought in and how much you've actually spent -- plus a nice color coded reminder of how you are doing on each budget line item.  Green means you are still under, Yellow is right on track, and Red is over spent.  Grey just means the total transactions is zero so far.  

So, this is pretty good, but it doesn't quite give me the reporting flexibility that I want, so one of my favorite features is Mint's ability to

Export

If you go to the Transactions page, and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see in tiny letters a link that says Export all transactions.  There are no additional export options -- you can either export everything or not.  My actual mint account has over 10,000 transactions since I've been using it since 2012.  Even so, all of those transactions don't take too long, nor too much space to export.  Then I can pull them into a spreadsheet, delete all of the transactions I don't need and analyze and manipulate the data to my heart's content.  I export the data from each year in January, so that I have it saved.  This Export option is available on the all transactions page and also for any search that you run.   For example, I can search for groceries and all of my transactions come up with that category. Now I can scroll down and export just these transactions.

So, that's my quick spin around Mint.  In the next 2 videos, I'll tell you what I like about Mint and the things I wish I could change.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!