The hardest part of budgeting is having one location that stores all your financial information. In the past budgeters have had to pull bank statements, credit card statements, saving, and everything else in between in order to figure out the full picture. Enter MINT. The easiest, most efficient way to manage your money online. Best part...TOTALLY FREE. How are you not already using this budget miracle??
If you are technology-challenged, the idea of
using an online tool for money management can seem severely overwhelming. Just
searching for a How To Video for Mint returned over 29,000 hits on YouTube. Below I've outlined the best teaching Videos
with My Tips and Notes.
I could never find a
single Training Video that covers beginning to end How to Set Up and Use
Mint. I've broken out the best training
videos on the web in a logical order, (Note some videos may seem to overlap in
content. )
For additional
resources, or questions on a specific task in Mint, check out http://www.howtousemint.com/ and the mint.com YouTube channel
Watch the Demo first
to get a quick overview before getting your hands on experience: http://www.howtousemint.com/learn-to-use-mint-com-via-the-online-demo-site/
Steps by Step Tutorials for
Mint.com
- Setup Mint.com Account and Link Accounts
TIP:
- Add all Savings, Checking, Credit Card and Loan accounts. Any account that has money going in, or being taken out needs to be accounted for. Other "Assets" such as your cars or house are not as important.
- Review & Edit Transactions
TIPS:
- Mint will import the last couple months of bank transactions. Take the time, and review each line and category. You will most likely want to change a couple of transaction categories to tailor to your Budget needs
- Keep Categories to a manageable count. Having more than 20 categories to budget against will become more difficult to manage.
Group
similar transactions into a single Category. Example: Starbucks will be
imported as Coffee Shops. Unless you really want to track exactly what you
spend on coffee, think about just using Food & Dining or Restaurants.
- Review your Transactions at least once a Week. This will make End of Month reviews so much easier.
- Setting up a Budget
TIPS:
- Setting up a Budget will be the hardest task when using Mint. You may not even know what you think you should be spending on Gas. If you are struggling with where to start, checkout my other post on CREATE A BUDGET
- You don't have to create a budget for every single category of transactions. You may already know your big budget breakers such as restaurants, gas, or clothes shopping. Set up a Budget for those categories in which you'd like to monitor.
- Then set up an alert. Alerts are automatic emails sent to you when you are getting close, or over your budget.
- Trends
TIPS:
- As great as Mint.com is, it has some enhancements it should do to the trends section. Trends are great to see how your spending is trending. I like to analyze this page at the end of the month to see a quick snapshot of that month's spending.
- It is difficult to see month-to-month budget vs actual spending. To do that, take a look at my other post on CREATE A BUDGET to see how you can compare your Expected Spending to Actual Spending.
Just going through
the above steps in Mint will greatly benefit you monthly budget. More advanced
Features of Mint include setting Goals such as Paying off a Mortgage or saving
for a Big Trip. The Investment feature
tracks brokerage accounts and shows you how your investments fare against key
Indexes.
- Goals
- Investments
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