Transcription - Mint Tips for Holiday Personal Budgeting
December 2007
Mint Tips for Holiday Budgeting
I’m Aaron Patzer, the founder and CEO of Mint.com. It’s the holidays and you don’t want to be a scrooge with our gift giving but you also don’t want to go massively into debt.
Interviewee on the street –
Female 1 – “I haven’t gone into debt, I’m pretty much done with my shopping, but I definitely spent more than I thought I was going to”
Female 2 “No, everything is in line for my holiday spending”
Male 1 interjects “You’ve been pretty good”
Female 2 “Yeah, I usually start saving up ahead of time and I buy presents throughout the year”
Male 2 “I’m not in debt at all, but then again I don’t know either”
Female 1 “And you’re not done shopping”
Male 2 “I’m not done shopping”
As a general rule I recommend not spending more than one two week pay check on your holiday spending, so if you make $60,000 a year it’s probably about $1500 as a two week, after tax take home and that’s $1500 for gifts, decorations, the bottles of wine you bring to parties, everything all together.
Female 1 “I know where my money goes, I track it, but I’m surprised by the end of the month how much I’ve spent yes”
Male 3 “I spend a lot of money travelling, drinking, going out, everything that is short term and doesn’t get me anywhere”
Now for most people budgeting is a dirty word, it’s a difficult thing to stick to, and that’s largely because most tools out there and most books on budgeting go about it the wrong way. So instead of constantly monitoring your finances, instead of logging into your bank every day, instead of keeping a journal of all of your purchases Mint.com does all that for you. Most people don’t need to budget every single category, you usually have a few problem areas – you know that you go out to restaurants too much, you know you spend a little too much on clothes or you buy a few too many DVD’s and really you just need to watch those categories, and everything else leave it be.
So if you see over the past three or four months you’ve been spending $300 a month on restaurants you probably don’t want to set a $50 budget, it’s just not realistic and you are just gonna frustrate yourself. So instead set a $250 budget, and then the next month set a $200 budget, and keep going down until you reach your goal. So in sum you really only need to budget and watch a few problem areas whether you are budgeting for the holidays or whether you are budgeting for the New Year. You want to set realistic budgets based on your historic spending, don’t cut too hard too fast or you’ll never be able to stick with it. And you want to use a tool like Mint.com that monitors your spending from all the different credit cards and debit cards. Just set it up once and check it once a week, every couple of weeks and if anything goes wrong, if you go over your budget Mint will send you an email, at text message and it’s a really easy way to stick with your budgets.
