When I recently discovered that my local bank had finally been added to Mint, I immediately signed back up. MakeUseOf did an overview of Mint back in 2007 when it was in its beta release. Since then, it has grown and added more features so it’s time for an update post.
Mint is a free, automatic online finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money and Quicken. Since adding my financial accounts (Paypal, credit cards, banking), I‘ve stopped using similar software applications on my Mac and iPhone. Mint does all the personal accounting work for me. In this article, I’ll share some tips on using the features of Mint to track and budget your spending.
How to Make a Mint Budget – Setting Up Categories
When you add your financial accounts to your Mint account, about a year’s worth of your past and current transactions get added to your account. Using your past transactions, Mint assigns your transactions to various categories. For example, credit or debit card transactions you make at Target will be assigned the Shopping category. A transaction from Best Buy will get assigned to Electronics & Software. You may find that many of your transactions get assigned appropriate categories, but you can also change or create categories for any transaction.
Here’s how to do it.
- Open your Mint account and click on Transactions in the menu bar at the top of the webpage. Select the transaction for the category you want to change.
- Select the current category for the transaction and click on the triangle in the selection field to either change the name of the category or see if there’s a sub-category. So if say your transaction is from Amazon, you can leave the default category as Shopping or you can assign it a sub-category, such as Books or Clothing.
- Now that you have changed the category, you will probably want all future transactions from say Amazon to all be labeled Books instead of just Shopping. To make this happen, you need to change the rules set up for this type of transaction. Click on the Edit Detail tab.
In the resulting dialog box, select “Always rename Amazon as Amazon and categorize as Books.“ This new rule will change all existing and future Amazon transactions. Notice also, you can assign tags to transactions, which is great for keeping track of tax related expenses as opposed to personal expenses. By clicking “Manage your tags“, you can change, add, and delete tags.
When you first set up your account and add transactions, you may find there are numerous transactions which are uncategorized. Taking the time to set up rules for uncategorized transactions will inevitably help you monitor your spending. Also, one useful tool in this regard is that you can click on the “Show all“ button on the right side of your Transactions page to get a list of the total spending for all transactions for a particular category, sub-category, or store.
Setting Budgets
One of the best reasons for using Mint and taking the trouble to categorize transactions is that you can make Mint budgets, especially for discretionary spending items and services. For example, I like to make sure I’m spending a limited amount of money on books and iPad/iPhone apps per month. If I don’t monitor my spending on such items, I tend to overspend and even sometimes waste money by not tracking those expenses.
Again, when you set up your Mint account, Mint creates a few default budgets which you can change or create new ones. To do this, click on Planning in the menu bar of your account’s page. Select the budget you want to change or update. Or click the Create Budget button to create a new budget.
For an existing budget, you can increase or decrease the amount by clicking on the left and right triangles. You can make additional changes by clicking the Edit Details tab, in which you can change the time period of the budget, and check whether or not you want the selected budget to roll over to the next month. As you spend money toward those budgets, the bar color will change from green to red when you are over your budget.
Almost everything about Mint is automatic. So once your transactions are updated for your accounts, all your categories and budgets get automatically updated. You never have to manually input that data.
Setting Up Email Alerts
Another useful Mint feature which helps you monitor your finances is by sending you email alerts for when you’ve gone over budget, when your balance is low, when a bill is due, and so on. You can configure the settings for alerts by clicking on Your Profile on your accounts page. In the drop-down box, select Email and Alerts to set up changes.
Get the Free Mint iPhone App
If you‘re an Apple mobile user, you can download the free Mint app to view your online account. Transactions, however, may not immediately show up on your Mint account. It may take an hour or two to get updated. But using the mobile app also allows you to add tags and/or change categories for new transactions. Your new alerts also show up in the app.
There are many more features in Mint, and once you get your accounts set up, you’ll see that it provides you with a wealth of information about your finances, as well giving you tips on how to save money.
Mint.com may not be the best solution for say tracking a large business account, but for personal and small business accounts, the service is a huge time saver. The biggest drawback to the service, however, is that it doesn’t provide a way to print out reports of your transactions, categories, and summaries. You have to download the data and then set up a spreadsheet to create reports. Hopefully the developers of Mint will address this problem in future updates.
Let us know if and how you use Mint.com. Has it helped you budget your spending?
When I recently discovered that my local bank had finally been added to Mint, I immediately signed back up. MakeUseOf did an overview of Mint back in 2007 when it was in its beta release. Since then, it has grown and added more features so it’s time for an update post.
Mint is a free, automatic online finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money and Quicken. Since adding my financial accounts (Paypal, credit cards, banking), I‘ve stopped using similar software applications on my Mac and iPhone. Mint does all the personal accounting work for me. In this article, I’ll share some tips on using the features of Mint to track and budget your spending.
How to Make a Mint Budget – Setting Up Categories
When you add your financial accounts to your Mint account, about a year’s worth of your past and current transactions get added to your account. Using your past transactions, Mint assigns your transactions to various categories. For example, credit or debit card transactions you make at Target will be assigned the Shopping category. A transaction from Best Buy will get assigned to Electronics & Software. You may find that many of your transactions get assigned appropriate categories, but you can also change or create categories for any transaction.
Here’s how to do it.
- Open your Mint account and click on Transactions in the menu bar at the top of the webpage. Select the transaction for the category you want to change.
- Select the current category for the transaction and click on the triangle in the selection field to either change the name of the category or see if there’s a sub-category. So if say your transaction is from Amazon, you can leave the default category as Shopping or you can assign it a sub-category, such as Books or Clothing.
- Now that you have changed the category, you will probably want all future transactions from say Amazon to all be labeled Books instead of just Shopping. To make this happen, you need to change the rules set up for this type of transaction. Click on the Edit Detail tab.
In the resulting dialog box, select “Always rename Amazon as Amazon and categorize as Books.“ This new rule will change all existing and future Amazon transactions. Notice also, you can assign tags to transactions, which is great for keeping track of tax related expenses as opposed to personal expenses. By clicking “Manage your tags“, you can change, add, and delete tags.
When you first set up your account and add transactions, you may find there are numerous transactions which are uncategorized. Taking the time to set up rules for uncategorized transactions will inevitably help you monitor your spending. Also, one useful tool in this regard is that you can click on the “Show all“ button on the right side of your Transactions page to get a list of the total spending for all transactions for a particular category, sub-category, or store.
Setting Budgets
One of the best reasons for using Mint and taking the trouble to categorize transactions is that you can make Mint budgets, especially for discretionary spending items and services. For example, I like to make sure I’m spending a limited amount of money on books and iPad/iPhone apps per month. If I don’t monitor my spending on such items, I tend to overspend and even sometimes waste money by not tracking those expenses.
Again, when you set up your Mint account, Mint creates a few default budgets which you can change or create new ones. To do this, click on Planning in the menu bar of your account’s page. Select the budget you want to change or update. Or click the Create Budget button to create a new budget.
For an existing budget, you can increase or decrease the amount by clicking on the left and right triangles. You can make additional changes by clicking the Edit Details tab, in which you can change the time period of the budget, and check whether or not you want the selected budget to roll over to the next month. As you spend money toward those budgets, the bar color will change from green to red when you are over your budget.
Almost everything about Mint is automatic. So once your transactions are updated for your accounts, all your categories and budgets get automatically updated. You never have to manually input that data.
Setting Up Email Alerts
Another useful Mint feature which helps you monitor your finances is by sending you email alerts for when you’ve gone over budget, when your balance is low, when a bill is due, and so on. You can configure the settings for alerts by clicking on Your Profile on your accounts page. In the drop-down box, select Email and Alerts to set up changes.
Get the Free Mint iPhone App
If you‘re an Apple mobile user, you can download the free Mint app to view your online account. Transactions, however, may not immediately show up on your Mint account. It may take an hour or two to get updated. But using the mobile app also allows you to add tags and/or change categories for new transactions. Your new alerts also show up in the app.
There are many more features in Mint, and once you get your accounts set up, you’ll see that it provides you with a wealth of information about your finances, as well giving you tips on how to save money.
Mint.com may not be the best solution for say tracking a large business account, but for personal and small business accounts, the service is a huge time saver. The biggest drawback to the service, however, is that it doesn’t provide a way to print out reports of your transactions, categories, and summaries. You have to download the data and then set up a spreadsheet to create reports. Hopefully the developers of Mint will address this problem in future updates.
Let us know if and how you use Mint.com. Has it helped you budget your spending?
penis enlargement
Another year, another debt-filled holiday season passed, another New Year's resolution to control spending. Sound familiar? Are you ready to take control of your financial planning? If so, personal finance budgeting is key. There is hope, and it is easier than you might think.
We must begin by getting back to the basics. In a society filled with credit cards and not a whole lot of personal responsibility, money slips away faster than we can dream up ways to make it. The first step to taking control is to STOP IT! Stop the cycle. Stop charging things you have to "figure out" how to pay. Stop imagining that your needs and wants are on equal footing. If you find yourself in this cycle, it truly is time to revaluate. Your own personal finance budgeting course starts right now.
Ready for the first step? Before you can hope to improve your personal finance budgeting skills, you need to do a little planning. First, put your credit cards away. You will not be using them any longer. I know there is something to be said for using credit cards that reward you, however, if you need to gain control over your finances, now is not a good time to be utilizing that benifit. For the purposes of this budget, you will be using cash. You need to regain a realization of how quickly money leaves your wallet and what kind of things you are spending it on. You may have to limp your way to your next paycheck, but in the process you will begin to understand what is happening in your personal finances.
It is time to face reality. Sit down with all of your bills. You need to add up every single dime you have an obligation to spend every month. Divide by the number of paychecks you have each month. This figure represents the amount of money you need to leave in the bank when you receive each check. Now, subtract this amount of money from your check total. The sum is the amount of money you have to spend. If you are more of a visual person the formula will look like this.
Total amount of bills per month / number of paychecks per month= Sum A (amount you need to set aside each paycheck for bills.
Total amount each paycheck- Sum A= Sum B (spendable cash.)
Once you have set the ground work, you can begin step two. At this point you need to realistically set up a budget. If your budget does not provide the amount of money you need to subsist on, this article will not help you until it can. Personal financial planning must start with a personal workable budget. Help yourself by getting one in place and then move onto step three.
Payday (yeah! It's OK, you can cheer!) Drive straight to the bank and withdraw your "spendable cash" (Sum B). Look at all the cash you have and prepare for the shock of a lifetime. You will be stunned how quickly the money will slip away!
Now that you have had all that fun oohing and aahing over all our cash, we must get back to work with step four. You now need to set up your envelopes. Simple white envelopes are the basis of getting finances under control (are you shocked?) To begin, you must retrieve your budget. Now, begin labeling envelopes. The envelopes represent different sections of your budget and can be whatever you want them to be. However, general guidelines do apply. An effective personal finance budget relies on categories such as food, miscellaneous household items, gas, entertainment and medical expenditures. If these categories don't all work for you, tweak the system until your envelopes match your lifestyle spending habits. From your budget, determine how much money belongs in each and divide your cash into each envelope.
Step five bring about the difficult part of your budget. You may only spend from your envelopes. When you get gas, take money out of the gas envelope. When you need groceries, take money out of the grocery envelope. When you want to eat out, money only comes from the entertainment envelope. I said this step was going to be hard. It becomes difficult when you realize that if the proper amount of money isn't available in entertainment, you can't eat out. This is where many budgets fall away, but revamping your life is going to take some self control and hard work.
It is time to Begin the final step (yeah! Go ahead, you can cheer again!) you need to set up one more envelope. This is the "overspent" envelope. Realistically, in today's world you may have to charge an item at some point. You may have forgotten your cash or are purchasing from a business that only excepts credit cards for payment. When this happens, you MUST remove money from the appropriate envelope and put in your "overspent" envelope. Do nothing with the money in this envelope except forget about it! The money is gone. When the credit card bill arrives, deposit the money back into the bank so you can pay the bill. When you hold fast to this one step you will eliminate any credit card problems you have had. And, let's be honest, won't that be wonderful?
Learning this very effective method of personal finance budgeting may seem a little overwhelming at first, but stick with it. You will be amazed as your own personal responsibility and determination grows as you realize where your money is actually being spent. The hard work will pay off and your newfound financial freedom will be more than a little pleasant in the coming year.
Arrowheadlines: Chiefs <b>News</b> 6/21 - Arrowhead Pride
Good morning boys and girls. An early edition of Arrowheadlines today so I can hit the road (pretty much the case all week). Here's today's Kansas City Chiefs news (tweet-free). Enjoy!
Ellen Crashes <b>News</b> | NBC Chicago | Ellen DeGeneres | Mediaite
In the middle of broadcasting the daily news brief, a local Chicago news team was pleasantly interrupted by Ellen DeGeneres, who showed up unexpectedly to take command of the newscast, cheer up the place and hand out all sorts of ...
Chinese Currency <b>News</b> Lifts Asian Stocks - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com
China's weekend announcement of more flexibility for the renminbi triggered an across-the-board rally in Asian stock markets Monday as investors welcomed the political and economic implications of the announcement.
