Start Budgeting with Mint (Part 4 of 4)

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the last video in this four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  This video will cover tracking your spending progress against your budget and making adjustments when needed.

In the 4 steps to successful budgeting, this video will cover the last 2: tracking progress and making adjustments.  So far we have linked all of your spending accounts to Mint, developed a list of budget categories, tagged your historic transactions, set an amount for each budget category, done a quick savings check, and entered your budget into Mint.  Now you are ready to start to spend some money and

Track Your Progress

I split this step into two different parts: categorizing your ongoing transactions and reporting on your budget.  Let’s start with

Categorizing Your Transactions

As you spend, Mint automatically imports your transactions from your bank or credit card account.  It will then attempt to categorize your transactions for you. It uses the same algorithms that it used when it did the original import, so suffice it to say, you’ll need to change many of your categories to the ones you’ve chosen for your budget.  This requires some maintenance. I would say you should do this weekly at a minimum.  Twice a week would be ideal. If you are on a really tight budget, you may want to be categorizing even more frequently, so that your budget reporting is as accurate as possible.  I would definitely download the mobile app for Mint to do regular categorizing since you can then do it while waiting in line or whenever you have a free moment. I’ll show you how to do it on the mobile app. Log in, then hit anywhere in Accounts, which will bring you to the Accounts screen.  Now choose All Accounts. You can see the category for each transaction here. All these grey transactions are pending, so don't waste your time applying categories to them -- the categories don't usually stick to pending transactions and you'll probably have to do them again.  Scroll down to where you last stop categorizing -- it might not be super obvious, so just keep going until you start to recognize transactions that you have edited in the past.  Select a transaction, hit category and either scroll to select another category, or search for one up here and select.  You can also put in a note or change the vendor of the transaction just like you can in a browser.  A couple of tips:

• Split Transactions - There will sometimes be transactions that can be applied across two different categories.  For example, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought $42 worth of groceries and $109.11 worth of household stuff (I love my new vacuum sealer).  How do I reflect that?  You can split the transaction.  You can even do this from your iPhone -- within a transaction, hit the Split button up here.  Change the categories and put in the amounts -- the app does the calculations for you.  You can add as many splits as you want.  In a browser, the split button is under Edit Details and looks like a little split road.  Again you can put in your amounts.  It doesn't do the calculations on the fly like the iPhone app, but you can force it to by adding another split and getting rid of the zero one.  Now that we are in the Edit Details portion of the transaction, let's talk about
• Creating Rules - If you go to the same lunch place twice a week and every time Mint guesses the wrong category, you can create a rule to make Mint choose the right one from here on out.  Change the category on an transaction and hit Edit Details.  Then you can check this Rules box to have Mint always categorize transactions coming in with that vendor name with that category.  This is only available on the browser version, but is a huge time saver -- particularly when you are just starting out.  
• Bulk Edit - One other tip might come in handy when tagging your transactions.  If you have more than one transaction to edit and you plan to tag them all with the same category, you can use bulk edit, but only in the browser version.  Use these checkboxes to the left to select multiple transactions and then hit Edit Multiple.  From this screen you can change the category for all by editing the category and hitting I'm Done.  You'll see you can also edit the date and description for multiple transactions this way.  Once you've tagged every transaction with the correct category (aside from the pending ones), you can

Report on Your Budget

Go to the Budget screen to see how your current spending is doing against your budget.  Green is good, red is not so good.  If you open the Everything Else divider, that should only contain pending transactions if you've categorized everything properly. At the end of the month, you should be able to see how much you brought in in income for the month, minus your actual spending, and what is left over.  You should be able to see what you actually spent vs. what you budgeted to spend.  In addition, you can extend the date range of the report to include all of this year, all of last year, or just drag to select the months that you want.  Since I have some irregular expenses that I budget for all year, I like to look at the current year view.  If you have questions about the amounts in any category, clicking on the budget name will bring you to a filtered list of the transactions that are tagged with that category.  That way you can quickly determine whether something is in the wrong place.  Frequently checking how you are doing against your plan should help to you to determine when to make purchases, when to hold off until next month, when to cook at home, and when to start living on ramen and canned beans!  For this reason, it’s great that you can also check your progress against your budget from your phone. From the main screen, pull the top section down to reveal more options. Choose Budgets. It shows you the current month and I think checking the transactions for each category is easier — just tap — and easy to get back to the budget screen.   As of the latest update, you can now check previous months as well, just tap the arrow next to the month to review previous months.  There is still no way to see results for multiple months. 

Also, if you are like me, you’ll be happy to know that you can also export your data to manipulate it in a spreadsheet to do your own reporting.  To export all transactions, you’ll need to be in a browser.  Go to the transactions page, scroll to the bottom and choose this tiny link to Export All (however many) transactions.  That will save them all to a CSV file which you can pull into a spreadsheet to slice and dice as you please.  Okay -- the final step in the budgeting process is to

Make Adjustments

As you live with your budget, you'll need to both make adjustments to your budgeted numbers AND to your behavior.  Making adjustments to the numbers in Mint is as easy as editing the line items in the budget screen, but I will say that Mint doesn't give you the option to make the adjustment retroactive.  So, if you realize that you need to budget a bit more for Auto All and want to change that budget from $150 to $250 per month it will only apply to the current month and forward.  If you look back at last month, that change will not be in effect.  

Changing your behavior is much trickier.  I'll save my tips for that for a future video.  I hope this gave you some good ideas to get started.  Good luck with your new budget!  And let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!