How to Budget with Mint
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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.
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« Previous 1 2I have just started using mint and have a lot of cash transactions, since I try to avoid using credit cards. Is there anyway to break down this information into budgeted categories. for example $200.00 may go in several directions groceries, doctor, haircut etc. How do I track this?
In regards to your question about how to track cash – On any transaction you can open the little “edit details” tag, and then select “split” to split that transaction up into different categories. How you want to actually keep track of all the cash spending though, is up to you.
Go to Transactions, find your category (probably Cash & ATM). When you highlight your transaction click on Edit Details for that row to open a new window. You can either create new categories for that cash transaction OR you can use the split transaction which lets you break down your cash expenses to existing categories.
Mint just rocks. You’re going an awesome job
I do regular transfers from my checking to my savings account and for my credit card payment (as they’re all in the same bank). How can I track these transfers in my budget plans? They don’t register as expenses, since they’re getting transferred from one account to another and I don’t “lose” the money, but they do reduce the amount of money I can spend on my monthly expenses.
Agreed. I used my bank’s website to set up a monthly automated transfer from checking to savings, with the intention of it being money for home repairs, or more expensive items. It would be extremely useful if I could input this transfer into my budget.
I have more than one account and i just want mint to reconize just one of them ( my personal checking account ) but i also have a bussiness account that it tracks with my personal account. This makes all my info tie together making it hard to see how me & my spending patterns & budgets are recorded.
Click on Your Accounts. To the far right, you will see Hide. Click on that and then click on “all of mint” for the accounts you would like to hide.
I am a early adopter of Mint and have been trumpeting its virtues to many. I appreciate the new features of the budgeting section. I however miss the date progress line as part of the overall budget bar graph. Also the Numerical illustration of how much is left of the total… is nice but If you could also incorporate the Total Progress bar on that page.
Al
Wow this is the best money budgeting system ever!!!!! This relieves alot of money managing stress as well as over spending. I would love to see even more advice articles and email updates
Is there anyway to set up budgeted income, in addition to monthly income, that’s not monthly. I need to set up two items, one quarterly and one semi-annually.
I’m finding it very tedious to edit my existing budget, and I found it difficult to set it up in the first place. The new feature for periodic expenses is useful but still not very practical. I’d love to be able to just see all my budgeted amounts on a single screen and be able to edit them there, without all the jumping to different pages and views for every adjustment. I want to create blanket amounts for broad categories, but to do that I have to go back in and delete budgeted amounts for smaller subcategories, and I can’t believe how many clicks and screen changes it’s taking me to do this. I sure hope the budgeting feature is one they’re continuing to work on.
Agree! I’m an new mint user and am loving it. However, the planning page can be made significantly easier/faster to complete. (1) Showing the budgeted income/expenses for multiple months ahead, all in one planning page, would provide better visibility to the user on those irregular expenses. (2) Allowing budget edits in the same page as opposed to opening popups would be a big time saver. (3) Remembering how the user left the categories would help – so that one doesn’t need to resort every time one navigates back to the planning page, which is a lot of re-sorting during the budgeting process. (4) The items could be compressed vertically so that more lines fit in the page, therefore reducing the need to scoll up and down so much. (5) If the simplicity of the current planning page needs to be maintained for basic users that dont have many items or enter irregular expenses, these improvements could be offered as an alternate view – giving the users the choice. Again, love mint. It’s the best tool ever. Keep up the good job guys!
I have been using Mint for a while now and while I appreciate updates maed to improve the process, I find the budget overview on the front page to be a step backward from what was there before. I liked seeing all my budget lines right there with the line that tracked where I was in the month. I don’t like the red, yellow and green buckets that my budget is placed in now.
I find the recent updates to have caused far more confusion than anything else. I at least understood the old (overly simplifed) system. The new system doesn’t explain itself well, and leaves me wanting the old system back. For example, budgets are only active going forward in time. So if you sign up today and create a budget for calendar year 2009, it only includes today (September 26) through the end of the year. Mint actually considers this a feature so you won’t mess up any previous budgets. It should give the option to over-write previous budgets, or at least recognize when no previous budget exists for that category. This functionality is undocumented and was only discovered by chance in a mint forum post.
I am having trouble setting up my budget. can anyone give me step-by-step instructions?
-Thanks.
I am a server at a restaurant and get paid almost all of my income with cash from tips. I don’t see any way to enter cash income, which means that for this program to work I am forced to deposit my cash in the bank first before spending it, which is rather tedious. I would love it if there was a way to enter cash income. Also, the iPhone app doesn’t allow me to record cash transactions. I’m just starting to use Mint though, and I’m excited about it nevertheless.
How do I add my income to the budget??? Can anyone help?
From the planning page, click on the second vertical tab at the left hand side(Budgeted Income). Clicking on the first vertical tab at the left hand side (Budgeted Expenses) will take you back to the original planning page.
I have been using Mint for over 6 months. Overall, I think it’s a great program. I thought it was fabulous at first, but now I am not so sure. I am seriously considering changing to a different program for budgeting. The changes made recently have made the budgeting feature extremely confusing.
For example, I am unable to change the categorization of certain items. Even if I keep past months expenditures under the original category, I am unable to change the category for this month. In one such item, after attempting to recategorize, the costs now show up twice in my budget, once under my new category while continuing to be shown within the previous category. Thus, the identical expenses are deducted twice from my budget. Additionally, in my “bills and utilities” category, my budgeted amount is listed as $0. However, when I go in to try to set a budget amount, I am told I already have a budget set and will need to override that. When I agree to do override, the budget continues to show as $0.
Is there anyone who can help with this??? In the current form, my budget is basically useless.
Just started using Mint but I would appreciate some help / thoughts on a couple of quesitons:
- I have multiple accounts and one bank; however, I only want to analyze a single account using Mint. Mint did not give me an option to select the one account when I setup my bank. How do I accomplish this?
- Mint only brought in a couple weeks of transactions for my accounts. I would like to at least get the full month of October…how do I bring in more transaction history for an account?
why is mint double counting my credit card transactions? I had a charge for 1,000$ and it shows up twice. I know mint is counting it twice because I got an alert saying I exceeded this budget item by $2,000. How do I delete the second entry when this happens?
I am just beginning the set up process with Mint. One of the questions, however, asks me for my credit score. Up to this question, I had been filling out the debts and balances of both my husband and I combined. Now it asks for a single credit score. I am supposed to be filling this out based on an individual profile?
I have a car loan with Wells Fargo, but Mint is not allowing me to set up the loan account because it is only recognizing Wells Fargo as a credit card or bank, not a car loan. What can I do?
I am having the exact same problem — it is not recognizing Bank of America home loans for my mortgage or BMW financial services for my car loan — only as a credit card account……….
I still would like to see a printable Profit & Loss type report for customizable periods. Something that I think would be beneficial to those managing their assets and making long term goals – as well as to present to their financial advisers.