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

Americans are drowning in debt. We’re falling behind on our credit card payments, our car payments and our mortgages, largely because we’re not taking our personal expenses management seriously enough. Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing. Borrowed funds now equal 138 % of annual household income, a sign we have taken on way too much debt.

THE DEBATE:

With the dreaded “R” word hanging over our collective heads, who can stop our country’s slide into debt? Is it the government’s job to stop the insanity or is it our responsibility to clean up our own messes? Shouldn’t we blame our debt issues on our inability to handle our personal finance management obligations?

COMMENTARY:

The stock market is down, and we’re seeing more and more unfavorable news on the economy coming to light these past few months. It doesn’t help that the financial sector has been reporting earnings well below analyst’s expectations, as a result of consumer credit problems and loan write-offs.

Much of the downtrend has been attributed to the subprime mortgage crisis and uncollectible loans that proliferated during a time of loose credit and high spending. Credit losses have been worsening for brokerages, banks and financial institutions as they write off bad loans and suffer through trading losses during a period of economic contraction. Bank of America, for example, reported an earnings plunge of 77 percent this week, after stating that they are reserving over $6 billion towards bad loans.

Financial institutions are in this situation because they are writing off bad debt that their customers have run up. What we’re witnessing now are the consequences of poor personal expenses management by consumers and investors across the board.

This is an example of how our collective personal debt has done a number on our economy.

My opinion? Our personal debt is our personal responsibility. It’s not the government’s job to bail us out from our credit card or mortgage debt. The real questions are: “Why are people in this country so far in debt?” and “What principles of financial responsibility should people be following to avoid such debt?”

At first glance, these questions would not appear to have easy answers. After all, Amazon.com lists over 10,000 books written on the subject of personal finance. It’s confusing, and personal finance management is not something they teach in school.

In reality, all of personal finance can be distilled into three basic principles:

1. Spend less than you earn: live beneath your means so you can save.
2. Make the money you have work for you: invest what you’ve saved and watch it grow.
3. Be prepared for the unexpected: have the right kinds of insurance, and diversify your assets.

Misapplication of these principles leads you into debt; successful application leads you to prosperity.

Most people get into trouble with the first principle, “spend less than you earn.” We each typically have 2-3 spending categories that are represent significant dollars and significant temptation. For lots of people, those include overspending on Housing, Cars, Monthly Services (cable? phone?) and Dining Out. The good news is that if you can make the tough decisions to cut back in those few areas, and have the discipline to stay under some lower budgets, you can make a dent in your debt, start to save and move forward with your financial plans.

Mint Tip: I designed Mint.com to help you readily identify your problem areas, suggest lower cost products and services, and give you all the automated tools available (web and email and SMS text alerts!) to help you keep on top of your money. And with minimal effort required (five minute set up) and for free. Mint is personal expense management made easy. I hope you’ll check out our online budget tool right now.

 
Further Reading:

Budget Planner
Create A Budget Online
Financial Budgeting Software
Budget Help

We’re incredibly honored to be receiving this award in the company of both huge players like Toshiba and Panasonic, and three other start-ups. Read the full PCWorld Award Announcement. We’re looking forward to the party/award ceremony in Vegas next month.

One comment, though: the article seems to imply that you have to give your bank account numbers or credit card numbers to Mint to use our financial planning software. Not true. In fact, we don’t even have the functionality to capture that information. You can get the straight story on How Mint Keeps you Safe on our website.

Our thanks to all of you who are actively using Mint.com as a microsoft money alternative. and as a loyal blog subscriber, we wanted you to be the first to know that we’ll be introducing some fresh features next month that we’re really excited about sharing with you. Looking forward to hearing from you all on those.

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*Okay, so there were only 3 of us at last year’s party. And, yes, we drafted on another, larger party for a group of start ups. But we are officially declaring it our first annual party.

Further Reading on the Topic:

Microsoft Money Alternative

Online Budget Tool

Finance Software