New! Know your true monthly cash flow

Did you spend more or less than you made last month? Mint’s new monthly Cash Flow graph can tell you. Keep track of your net saving or spending over time with this new feature on your Overview page.

 
New! How you doin’ – budget wise

Mint users told us that they wanted to watch their spending vs. their budgets over time, to understand whether they were sticking to – or blowing past – their spending goals. We had to support that kind of fiscal restraint, so you can now look back in time to see how you’re doing versus your budgets for each spending category this year. Congratulate or motivate yourself with the facts.

Please visit Mint.com today to check out these added, new features…and share your feedback.

If you’re a Bride- or Groom-to-be (or paying for someone else’s wedding!), we’d love to hear how you’re using Mint.com or other tools for your wedding budget planning.

Tracking all your Wedding Expenses in One Secure Place

Mint.com collects all of your checking, saving and credit card transactions in one secure place, and then updates that data automatically every day. This means you don’t have to collect receipts and bank statements, or visit multiple bank web sites, or build Excel spreadsheets to understand what you’ve spent. Or it means you don’t have to feel guilty anymore if you’re not already doing that bookkeeping! With Mint.com, you have a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date place to see all your wedding expenses online, anytime.

Understand Wedding Expenses by Category

As soon as you’ve added your bank and credit card accounts to Mint.com (learn How Mint Keeps You Safe), you’ll see all of your expenses for the past few months organized by spending category on the Trends page.

Your catering expenses will be automatically grouped in Food and Dining, dresses and accessories in Shopping, honeymoon tickets in Travel, all with amazing accuracy. But feel free to recategorize your expenses, if you prefer. For example, if you are having your wedding at a hotel, you can easily recategorize your payments to that hotel from Travel (where Mint will typically categorize hotel expenses) to another category.

Note: As Mint doesn’t currently have a Wedding category (you’ll be able to create custom categories later this year), you may choose to categorize all of your wedding expenses under a category that you don’t typically use. That way, you can see your total wedding spending in one “pie chart” on your Trends page. If you choose to use Hobbies, for example, just click on the Shopping slice and then on the Hobbies slice to see your total wedding expenses, by merchant.

You may also want to label your expenses. Labeling makes it even easier for you to track and manage your wedding expenses in the way that makes most sense to you. Just check one or more purchases on your Transaction page, click on Label and select Add New or Multiple Labels from the drop down menu. You can add multiple labels to a single transaction, or request that all transactions from a certain merchant get the same labels with a Rule.

It’s Easy to Find and Summarize Purchases

Can’t remember how much you paid the hotel as a room deposit for your wedding reception? Just search on the name of the hotel and you’ll find the date and amount of that deposit. Want a summary of all the payments you’ve made to your wedding planner? Just search on his or her business name to get the full list.

Want to know how much you’ve spent on your Bridesmaids? If you’ve labeled purchases as being for your Bridesmaids, just search on that term to see the total you’ve invested in the women who’ll be standing up for you (and telling stories to your Groom that you may be living down for quite a while).

Wedding Budgeting Made Simple

At this point, you’ve got your past wedding expenses well organized. Now, how do you stay on top of what you’ll be spending in the future? Mint.com can help you out here.

Mint.com automatically calculates a budget for you in five big spending categories, using your average monthly spending as guide. You can add categories, or change any monthly budget amount. Just click on the Add Budget link from the Overview page to make your choices. (If you’ve decided to collect all of your wedding expenses under the Hobbies category, just click on the Add Budget link and navigate from Shopping to Hobbies from the drop down menu.)

You can choose whatever dollar amount is appropriate for that month…probably a small percent of your total wedding budget if you’re more than 6 months away from the Big Day. You should expect that 30%-60% of your expenses will hit in the month of your wedding. See our recent post, Simple and Elegant Wedding Budgeting for a sample budget.

Wedding Expense Alerts

Mint.com also makes it easy to stay on top of what you’re spending, and to eliminate wedding budget tracking surprises, by sending you alerts via email or SMS text message. Some alerts that might be helpful:

• Your Bank Account Balance is Low. You want to avoid bouncing checks to your caterer and finding you have no entrees for your guests.
• Your Credit Card Bill is Due or Your Available Credit is Low. So you can be sure your card is approved when you’re picking up the tuxes at the last minute.
• You’ve Exceeded one of Your Defined Budgets. Remember, you can set budgets for any Mint.com category.
• Large Purchases or Large Deposits. Be the first to know when a big charge hits any of your accounts or when the check from his parents to cover your rehearsal dinner clears your account.

Click on the Set up Alerts button at the top of the Overview page to create your customized alerts.

At Mint, we’re always happy to hear from users that they’re feeling more on top of their spending because of our free, online budget tool. We are doubly happy when we hear that we played a small role in making a user’s Big Day easier, less stressful and even more affordable.

Mint Asks: Are you already using Mint to manage your wedding budget? Any tips to pass along? A pair of Mint t-shirts to anyone sending us wedding pictures from their Mint-managed nuptials!

Related Mint Links:

Budget Help
Create A Budget Online
Personal Finance Software
Free Money Manager

Personal finance tools and budget tracking are two things that we care about here at Mint. Learn more with great personal finance tools and tips in our blog article index.

It’s finally over. All those late night of hard work, sweating away — pummeling your controller in marathon Smash Brother tournaments with your room mates. Ah, good times.

You’re all done with college, you picked up your B.S. or B.A., and now you’re ready to actually do something with that piece of paper. Presenting it at the next Burger King won’t get you a meal, so getting a job is the next best thing.

That job, though, presents a new problem now that you’re no longer under your parents’ financial umbrella: how on earth do you manage your money after college? We recommend some personal finance tools.

We’re one step ahead of you.

Step 1: Double-check for any debt.

If you have debt (and lots of it), continue on to Step 2. If you’ve managed to skate through the past four years with a clean debt record (and we can’t imagine how, you lucky grad), skip ahead to Step 4.

Step 2: Look at your bills and cry.

So you have a mountain of debt. You went a little overboard on the “inebriation aids,” or the spring break trips, or the cell phone bills, or the restaurant tabs, or the fancy gifts for that girl/guy you can’t afford… or the student loan for that private liberal arts college to study Philosophy.

Take it all in. It is important for you to have a good, clear look at your debt. Think about how you would use personal finance tools to aid with your budget tracking.

Tip: Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t help. Differentiate the type of debt you have. Which ones have the highest rate of interest? Which ones are revolving (credit cards) and which ones are installments (automotive or student loans)?

Understand how you arrived at these debts. There’s not much to be said about student loans, but if you graduated with a large credit card bill, consider carefully if it was necessary spending, or if your habits of splurging caught up with you.

By being aware of where you stand financially, you can better plan where you should go next. With that in mind, let’s move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Paying it back, without resorting to Mom and Dad.

If your parents were willing and able to pay for your education, all the better. But if not, that’s okay, too. This is your education, after all. As long as you got something out of class besides an extra nap or two, that degree is your ticket to the next chapter of your life.

Remember that in Step 2, you figured out which debts were more expensive (higher interest rates, etc.)? Your best bet is to tackle those high-interest rate debts first. If your credit card debt is derived from frivolous spending, it’s crucial that you improve your spending habit as you pay off your debt. If you don’t change your ways, you can be paying the right percentage but still accumulate even more debt. Of course, as a Devil’s Advocate: There is a theory by Dave Ramsey that you should conquer your easiest debt first to get a psychological win. You can choose which is best for you.

One easy way to come up with more money is to cut any unnecessary expenses. Luxuries like cable TV or high-speed Internet may not be necessary in the short term. And although you’re attached to the hip with your cell phone, doing without its extra bill for a few months isn’t impossible either.

You should also understand that some of the debt you have may actually have tax advantages to them. Take, for example, student loans: Many types can be deducted as educational expense in tax filings, so you’ll want to keep your eye out for perks like these to manage your load. Take steps to research and familiarize yourself with your student loan terms. Paying attention to when you can consolidate your loans (and lock in lower rates) can also save you more money, and in some instances lower your monthly payment without incurring more finance charges.

Finally, in any debt repayment plan, proper budget tracking is important. The Fed of Chicago has a great page on how to budget. Once you have a better picture of your fixed and variable expense by creating a simple budget, you’ll have a better idea of how much you can afford to put towards your debt.

As you make progress in reducing and paying off your debt, you can head to Step 4 and take a breath of relief.

Step 4: Paid it off? No debt? It’s time to plan that future of yours.

Seeing as how we’re living longer these days — and hey, you might even wake up one day and decide you want a spouse and kids — you’re going to need to plan for that future now, so you don’t curse your 22-year-old self later. This is where the personal finance tools really shine.

Start out by determining your mid-term and long-term financial goals. Retirement goes in the long-term category, of course, but a mortgage down payment may be in the mid-term. Buying a car soon? Moving to Bahrain? Naming your future seven kids? Put it all in the hat. It may feel odd to think about what your financial goals will be five, 10, even 25 years from now; but putting a long lens on your future plans can really help you put the right foot forward in the next six to 12 months.

Retirement may seem awfully far away, too (after all, your parents might not even be retired yet, right?); But it’s imperative that you start making an automatic deposit towards your retirement as soon as you get that first paycheck. As you’ve probably already read or heard from other sources: The earlier you start to save and invest, the farther ahead you’ll be in the future. Read The Richest Man in Babylon for some great financial principles.

Because the amount you’ll need to retirement is obviously dependent on how you want to live when you’re old and feeble (we kid, we kid), it wouldn’t hurt to do some minor soul searching before you start utilizing online retirement planning worksheets.

Now that you’ve successfully stuck your head 40 years in the future, then, it’s time to take another look at the present by heading to Step 5.

Step 5: Staying in college-finance mode doesn’t hurt.

38-cent Cup O’ Noodles. 99-cent value meals. Huddling in a small room with friends (that always have worse hygiene than you). Most of us have gone through the usual college diet, and generally these are not by choice.

But just because you’re out of college and you’ve landed that hot-shot job at that investment bank, or that defense company, or that yet-another-Web 2.0 company — doesn’t mean you need to start spending it like there’s no tomorrow.

You don’t necessarily have to update your ride, your lodging, or your entire wardrobe, either — although something besides freebie t-shirts would admittedly be nice. If your lifestyle is still comfortable to you, then there’s little reason to change. Don’t start buying certain things because it seems “appropriate to do.”

Of course, on the other hand…

Step 6: Upgrade that concept of partying, please.

It’s okay to spend a little too. You’re older now. More sophisticated. You talk about politics as if you’ll really vote. You can actually name more than five items off of that fancy French menu. Burritos are no longer your sole source of food substance.

Just remember that Step 5 comes before Step 6, so don’t go crazy with your newfound cash flow.

Step 7: There’s still a long way to go.

Maybe it felt like forever (”super senior,” anyone?). Maybe the eight-ball is saying: “Outlook not so good.” Regardless of how you feel now, one thing is for sure — there’s more to come.

As with Step 4, there’s a future ahead of you; and whether you like it or not, money is going to help you get there.

Maybe you’d like to take off and travel one day (before you start on those seven kids). Maybe you’ll suddenly want a career change down the line. Maybe you’ll want to start your own company, or (gasp) further your education in graduate school. All of those will require even more from your check book. That’s okay, though: by the time you’ve reached Step 7, you’re ready to charge ahead with that knowledge stored away.

This post was written by Cap of StopBuyingCrap.com.

Further Reading

• free budget software
• online budget management
• personal finance advisors
• free financial calculator