We also have a post about budgeting. Hopefully it is helpful. Personally, Mint is the key to my budgeting success. I’m a big fan. Hopefully the budget will be found useful.

I recently gave Mint a try after using Mvelopes, but ultimately Mint’s just a tool for showing me where I messed up every month instead of helping me adjust my spending on the fly. I’d rather pay a few bucks to Mvelopes so that I know if I’m sticking to my budget or not.

Keep up the great work and look forward to the exciting things to come!

I took about 3-4 hours one night after Mint enabled the budget alerts on all categories and figured out my spending habits and how much I spend on bills per month.

The 60%/10%/10%/10%/10% (Bills/Short term savings/long term savings/retirement/etc) method works really well for most people, but as a single guy I can afford a little more in my entertainment budget than most. This my first attempt at a budget due to Mint’s great features, and so far I’m already seeing change in my bank account without affecting my expensive lifestyle.

The best way to do it is open an Excel spreadsheet and just categorizing things and seeing what the monthy spending is, then using that amount/percentage in Mint to set your budget. Works fantastically!

The four decisions that have the biggest impact on your cost of living are renting versus buying a home, deciding when you’re financially ready to have children, choosing where to live, and buying a new versus used car.

It’s funny that you mention these, because they’re also the four most common “default decisions”. The course of a “default life” is basically to go to school, then move back home, get a job, get a car, get married, have kids, get a house.

Without any specific life goals, most people will just fall into that lifestyle, which leaves lots of room for making very expensive life decisions.

The only exception that I’d like to take here is with point #4: new vs. used car. I would actually say that the expensive decision is first to live a car-driven lifestyle and then what type of car you’re going to buy.

Obviously, if you live in a rural area, the car is not an option. However, people in major cities (and there are lots of us) can often live “non-car-driven” lifestyles as long as we make the appropriate decisions early on.

My step-father was a stock broker in ‘84, when I was 4 and my sister was 1. He was making good money but they were paying off student loans and saving for a new place, so for a few years we lived in an apartment on the edges of downtown, without a car, and cycled everywhere. My parents used those “kid carriers” on the backs of the bikes, nowadays it would probably be those covered pull carts.

They eventually got a car and by ‘90 they had a down payment on their new house in a new city. But it was those few years of not having a car that really let them get there.