The budget tools in Mint.com have been massively overhauled in order to provide you with a more flexible approach to budgeting. The team at Mint believes that a budget that is too complex to set up and maintain is one that you won’t keep so they’ve made it as easy as possible to get started with a budget.
Before you can determine how much you should be spending within any given category such as rent, transportation or paying back your student loans, you’ll need to first get a handle on how much you are actually spending. When you first sign up for Mint.com you’re asked to add all of your financial accounts so that you can see all of your spending in a single place. You’ll get an at-a-glance view of your balances across all accounts — there’s no need to log into multiple web sites just to see your balances.
Automatically categorized transactions
Mint.com shows you exactly what you are spending and where by auto-categorizing all of your transactions. You don’t have to go through the laborious process of tagging your transactions. Mint does it for you. But it’s flexible. If you’d like to categorize your iTunes purchases as food (music being food for the soul after all), and not as Entertainment, Mint won’t stop you. You’ll be able to tell immediately what your average spending is in any given category.
It’s now possible to track your spending and income over time in order to get a true picture of exactly how much money you’ll have left over at the end of the month. Mint.com lets you compare you spending from one year to the next or from one month to the next. Your budgets roll over each month so you can make adjustments as you go along.
Charting your course
Mint.com helps you to create a budget based on your actual spending, not based on some pre-determined notion of what you should be spending. Pie and bar charts break down your spending by category so that you can see exactly how much of your income goes to mortgage or rent, groceries, dining out, and much more.
The real key to budgeting with Mint is that your budget and what sets it apart from using an Excel spreadsheet is that it is based on actuals not hypotheticals. We’ve added 16 interactive graphs that show you exactly how you are spending over time. With the graphs you can see exactly where you need to cut back in order to get your budget back on track.
Mint.com starts you out with a preliminary budget that you can adjust as needed to reflect your personal values and financial goals.
Setting goals
Mint.com’s budgeting tools are flexible enough to deal with a number of possible budgeting scenarios. Unlike with a spreadsheet or the tried and true back of the envelope approach, you can play around to see how changes in your spending or income level will affect how much money you’ll have left over at the end of the month. In other tools, you are locked into specifying a dollar amount for each category on a monthly basis.
But Mint.com lets you enter irregular expenses that don’t occur monthly. You can even see how one-time only expenses that you may not have accounted for will affect your savings plan.The ability to look forward allows you to use Mint.com as a planning tool that lets you see exactly how much money you’ll have left at the end of the month.
This works with income too. Whether you get paid each week, every two weeks, once a month, or entirely upfront, you’ll still know where you stand. Mint is also a great choice for freelancers, consultants and others who can’t count on a regular paycheck but still want to be able to budget into the future.
Monitoring Your Budget
You’ll want to make sure to log in to your account regularly to adjust for changes in your spending and income patterns. But Mint.com is also proactive in helping you with both setting up a budget and maintaining it. Not only do we give auto-categorize your transactions and provide a starter budget. We also send you either SMS or email alerts for when bills are due or when there’s been unusual spending in any of your accounts. By keeping a closer eye on your spending you’ll be able to keep your budget on track.
Mint’s approach to budgeting is simple, automatic and, above all, flexible enough to accommodate a variety of budgeting approaches.
