Budgeting can be a drag, but Mint makes it a lot less painful. It's free, it's easy, and it tracks your spending automatically as you go. But, if you're willing to dig in and use some of its less oft-touted features, you can really turn it into a powerhouse.
We've told you how to start a basic budget with Mint, and if you've never used Mint before, you should check that out first. Here, we're going to get a bit more in-depth and show you how to customize your experience with some more intermediate features and third-party tools.
Break Down Bulk Purchases with OneReceipt
Mint is awesome at automatically categorizing the money you spend. The problem is, some purchases include items that fall under different categories.
Let's say you bought coffee, shoes, and a book on Amazon. That single order falls under groceries, shopping, and entertainment, depending on how you categorize stuff. But because it's a single transaction, it'll simply fall under whatever Mint category you have assigned to Amazon (the default category is Shopping).
Sure, you can get around this by splitting the single Amazon transaction into multiple transactions. Hit the split icon, then list each item you purchased, how much it cost, and assign it to the appropriate category. The problem with this is: who remembers exactly how much they spent on each item in a single order?
Here's where OneReceipt comes in handy. We've told you about the tool before—it tracks your online receipts. Link it to your email, and it will find all your online purchases and keep track of them in its database. They now have a Chrome extension that works with Mint. It matches the receipts in your email to your Mint transactions. So when you see that single Amazon order in Mint, you can click on the receipt icon, and it'll tell you exactly how much you spent on each item in that order.
Yes, you still have to manually split and categorize your transaction, but this makes it a lot easier. Keep in mind: the extension works based on merchant and amount. So after you split a transaction, OneReceipt can no longer find it, since the amount has changed.
Budget Shared Expenses with Split & Hide
Joint purchases can be a pain in Mint. It's not Mint's fault—how is it supposed to know you shared a transaction with someone else? One way to get around this is the ol' "split and hide" method. Split the transaction, calculate the amount your friend paid you, then select "Hide from Budgets & Trends" in the category menu.
I use this method with the expenses I share with my boyfriend. We separate our finances, but we have a joint credit card for shared expenses. When the bill is due, I pay it, and he writes me a check for half. When Mint adds a transaction from this card, I simply divide it into two transactions, then hide one of them from my budgets and trends. This way, I get a more accurate idea of what my own spending looks like. When his check shows up in Mint, I simply hide that, too, since I've already hidden his share of expenses.
Rent is a little easier. I set up a rule to automatically categorize my rent check amount as "Mortgage and Rent." I pay the rent, my boyfriend writes me a check for his half, and that specific amount is also automatically categorized as Rent. Since his check is a debit, the larger rent amount is reduced to half in my budget—an accurate amount of what I actually pay.
Track Your Cash Spending with a Simple System
Mint's "Cash and ATM" category can really come in handy. When you take money out of your account, and then manually add your cash transactions, Mint will add it back to the "Cash and ATM" transaction until it hits zero.
So let's say you take out $100 cash for spending. First, make sure it's categorized as "Cash and ATM" in Mint. Then, let's say you spend $25 cash on lunch. Manually enter the cash transaction in Mint, and your original withdrawal transaction will now be $75. This makes sense—you added the $25 lunch, so everything is square.
Redditor Cputerace points out that you can also use this category to handle split transactions. If someone gives you cash for the dinner bill you paid, simply split the transaction in Mint, then add their part of the bill as "Cash and ATM." It's basically like a withdrawal, anyway, since you do have the cash on hand. If you simply hid their split amount from your budgets, the cash they gave you at dinner would not be accounted for in your budget.
And if you pay with cash a lot, there's a fun trick for that, too. After withdrawing a lump sum from your account, Reddit user InMintCondition suggests:
Categorize your ATM transaction as "Cash & ATM". This way the withdrawal doesn't show up in your budget. In my case, I took out $80 from the ATM.
Alter the date of your ATM transaction to the last day of the month (i.e. June 30). This way the ATM transaction is always top-most. You'll always know how much cash is in your wallet.
Let's say you spend $2 out of the $80 ATM cash at a restaurant. Click on "Split this Transaction" button on the ATM transaction from step 1. Categorize the $2 as "Restaurants". Now your cash spending is reflected in your Mint Budget.
Add additional "Splits" to the ATM transaction as soon as you spend cash. Eventually, the "Cash & ATM" transaction from Step 1 should become $0, since you've spent all the cash.
With this method, instead of entering your cash transactions, you simply keep splitting the original withdrawal transaction.
You can also enter your cash receipts manually. Keep track of your receipts in your wallet, and at the end of the week, month, whatever, take them out and enter them all in Mint as cash transactions.
Train Mint to Learn Your Spending Habits
Mint has a great "rules" feature that lets you automatically categorize spending. When you pick a category, Mint will ask you to always select that category for that merchant.
Let's say you go to a restaurant called Adobe. Mint might not recognize it, and it may automatically categorize it as lodging. But if you manually change the category to restaurants, Mint will give you the option to "always categorize this merchant at restaurants." Check that box, and you'll never have to re-categorize it again. If you go someplace a lot, this comes in handy.
You can do it with specific amounts, too. This is what I do with my half of the rent. The first time I categorized that check, I had the option to "always categorize checks for this amount as Rent & Mortgage." Now, Mint knows when I paid my rent, just based on the amount.
With these rules set up, you don't have to constantly enter and organize stuff in Mint. It becomes even more automatic—as long as you're willing to put in a bit of effort up front.
Of course, Mint will always require some maintenance. Chances are, you'll spend money someplace Mint doesn't recognize. Or you'll have cash transactions. Or you'll need to split transactions. The key with Mint is finding a routine to take care of this stuff. Once a week or every couple of weeks, go through your recent transactions and make sure of the following:
- Everything is categorized correctly
- All of your cash spending has been entered
- Bulk transactions have been split
- Joint transactions have been split
If you make a routine for "cleaning up" these things in Mint, it becomes even easier to use.
Organize Deductions and Expenses With Tags
With tags, you can add detail to your budget without making it too complicated.
You can create and add specific tags to transactions, so you can look up those transactions later. The built-in "reimbursable" tag comes in handy for looking up IRS deductions, for example. You can get even more detailed and track specific deductions, too. Add a "business travel" tag and "home office" tag, for example. This makes it really easy to find those deductions at tax time. All you have to do is search the tag.
Tags can help you stay organized well beyond that. Let's say I have a category for travel—this might include weekend trips, work travel, or vacations. Rather than create a separate category for each (which would make my budget overly complicated), I can simply add tags to keep track of things. So any purchases for my upcoming vacation will be tagged with "2015 Vacation":
All of my travel expenses are included on my budget main page. But if I want to find purchases specific to the vacation, I now have a tag to easily do this. And if I want to see how much I spent, total, on "2015 Vacation," I can head to Trends and search the tag.
You can also hide specific tags from the Trends page. So if I want to look at all my travel, minus what I spent on "2015 Vacation," I would open my preferences and hide that tag:
Learn How to Use Mint's Powerful Search Tool
It's pretty easy to find transactions with Mint. You can simply search the merchant or amount, or search by category and tag.
Let's say you pay estimated taxes throughout the year, and you want to see how much you've paid. If you've created a category for "Estimated Taxes," you can search that. If you've created a tag for it, you can search that, too, and all of your transactions will pop up.
From the Transactions page, you can also bulk edit items. So if you need to add a tag to all of those "Estimated Taxes" transactions, you can search, then bulk edit and add the tag.
You can also search for transactions that don't include a specific tag. Type "-tag:[search term]" into the search box and press enter. Using the tax example, this might come in handy if you want to see how much you owed the IRS last April, after paying your estimated taxes. If you simply searched "Taxes" or "IRS," all of your tax payments would pop up. But if you search "IRS —tag:Estimated Taxes," only your April payment will come up, provided you didn't tag it.
View a Date Range with a URL Trick
Unfortunately, Mint doesn't have a built-in feature for searching date ranges from the Transactions page. But you can do it by adjusting the URL a little. Here's how they tell you to do it:
When you go to the 'Transaction' page, the URL will be displayed as: http://ift.tt/1NTcQpT....
If you add the following (with the date range you'd like to see) at the end of the URL above, it should pull transactions for that specific range: startDate=06/01/2014&endDate=06/30/2014
It'd be great if there were an easier way to do this, but at least the function is still there.
Customize Mint's Interface With Mojito
If you really want to customize your experience, the Mojito extension for Google Chrome let's you refine Mint's interface to your liking.
It connects to your account and lets you customize your page layout. You can add recent transactions to your dashboard, list accounts by balance, hide cards with a zero balance, and more.
Once you download the extension, a little link to "Mojito" will appear on your Mint homepage. Click the link, and an options page will pop up.
The current version makes all changes locally, on-the-fly, and the source code is also freely available to view, so you can be confident it only does what it says it does.
Check Up on Your Investments
Mint is great for tracking your spending and making budgets, but it also has a basic overview of your investment accounts that lets you see how they're doing over periods of time: 1 day, 5 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or max.
Mint's Investment section includes all of your investment accounts and has four basic tabs: Performance, Value, Allocation and Comparison.
Under the Performance tab, you'll see the cost and value of your portfolio—how much you've contributed, and how much your investments have increased (or, less ideally, decreased) over time. If they've increased, you'll see green spikes. If they've decreased, you'll see red. The difference in cost and value is your "gain," and Mint will show you this amount as a cash value and percentage. To see these figures, hover over any part of the chart, and a small overview box will pop up.
The Value tab shows you this same change in value, but it's simplified in bar chart form. The Allocation tab shows you exactly what's included in your portfolio. If you invest in funds, the asset type isn't very useful (since funds are made up of a bunch of asset types). But you can also view by symbol, and a pie chart will show you exactly what funds you have in your portfolio, based on percentage.
With Mint's Comparison tab, you can compare your overall performance to the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq. Below each of the four basic tabs, there's also a list view that shows you your best and worst performing assets. You can sort these by value, too.
Mint is a great tool for basic budgeting, and you can really optimize it by making the most out of some of its features. With a little tagging, categorizing, and organizing, you can easily customize your Mint experience to your liking.
Images: gilmijar, simpletutorials.net, and doctormo. Screenshots via Mint.com.
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