Start Budgeting with Mint (Part 3 of 4)

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the third video in a four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  This video and the last one cover all of the steps involved in creating a budget.  In this one, we will do a quick savings check and enter your budget into Mint.

In the 4 steps to successful budgeting, we are still on the second step -- create a budget.  So far we have linked all of your spending accounts to Mint, developed a list of budget categories, tagged your historic transactions, and set an amount for each budget category.  Now it is time to do a 

Quick Savings Check

I’m assuming that the whole reason you are budgeting is to save a little more money, right?  Or pay down some debt? Well, let’s check to see if your budget is going to allow you to do this.  First figure out your monthly take home pay -- that is the money that actually hits your bank account.  I’m going to assume for now that you are already paying into a retirement account and that has come out of your check before it hits your bank account.  If that is not the case, you’ll have to take out an amount for retirement savings before beginning this exercise.

So, now you have your monthly income.  Now add up all of your budget categories.  Got that amount?  It is 20-30% less than your income?  If so -- great! If you stick to this budget, you’ll be able to put aside some money for emergency, for short-term savings, and for whatever else you are saving for.

Is it around the same as your income?  Well -- if you want to save anything or pay down debt, you are going to have to make some tough choices to reduce spending.  I give some basic rules of thumb for category amounts in my budgeting series -- particularly in video 3.

Even worse, is your total budget MORE than your income?  If so, start cutting those spending categories right away or you will begin to rack up debt and dig yourself into a major debt hole.  Your goal for your total budget should be 70% of income.  So, now that you’ve whittled your spending categories down to a reasonable amount, let’s

Enter Your Budget into Mint

Okay -- let’s go back into the Budget screen in Mint.  Mint has a weird thing where it calls a single budget category a budget.  I call the whole thing a budget, but you should know that when it says, like right here “Create a Budget”, it doesn’t mean create a whole multi-lined budget.  It just means create a single line item. Okay what you are looking at here is a couple of budgets that Mint has already created by default -- I think. It’s been a while since I made this account.  This budget for Groceries is set to $1000 a month. It’s green because I have spent less than $1,000 this month on that category. If I had spent over the budgeted amount, it would turn red. So, I’ll show you how to delete a budget, change a budget, and add a new budget.  First,

• Delete a Budget - I don’t have this Auto & Transport category on my budget list, so I’d like to get rid of this budget that Mint auto-created.  Remember, deleting a budget just means deleting the monthly value for this report. It WILL NOT delete any of your transactions OR delete the category as tagged OR delete the category itself.  It’s just for the purposes of the report shown on this page.  So, here’s how you delete a budget line item. You need to be in the current month (for whatever reason, Mint only allows you to edit budgets for the current month -- don't get me started).  If you hover your cursor over this budget line item you get some additional options. I’m going to chose to Edit Details.  Once I click on this, I can change the frequency of this budget, change the amount or delete this budget, which is what I choose to do.  You can see after you delete this budget that it no longer appears up here in the colorful section of the report. But, if you scroll down, you can find it down here under Everything Else.  Basically, this is the section that has all of the categories with no budgeted amount.
• Change a Budget - You saw in the Edit Details screen that you can change a budgeted amount.  You can also do it a little easier by hovering over the line item and changing the amount right here. And finally,
• Add a Budget - To add a line item, click this button Create A Budget.  Then you’ll choose a category, choose an amount, and hit save. You can also choose a frequency to be something different than every month.  I never do this since it doesn’t fit in well with my reporting. Instead, for expenses that only hit every few months like insurance, I figure out a monthly amount and budget that much per month so that I have it available when the bill comes due.  You can also choose to "Start each new month with the previous month’s leftover amount". This seems like a good idea -- basically rolling your leftover funds to the next month, but honestly I found it unnecessarily confusing, I had it turned on for some budget categories and not for others and it made it harder for me to see what was happening at a glance.  It’s totally up to you whether you use these features.  Okay -- put in your amount and hit Save. Now you’ll see that your new budget category is showing up in the report. And it is telling you whether you are under, meeting, or exceeding your budget visually.

Now go ahead and delete the budget categories you don’t need and edit or add new ones.  The total of your budgeted expenses on your worksheet should be the same as this number. If not, you’ll need to go back in and figure out where the error is.  You will also need to enter an income budget -- how much do you think you will bring in per month.  Be sure to create this within the "Income" primary category, so that it shows up in the right place on your report.   So, now you’ve set your budget and entered it into Mint! 

Join me in my final video of this series where you start tracking your actual progress against your plan and make adjustments when needed.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!