Better Budgeting: Making Mint.com Work For You

Budgeting is one of those things that we all know we should be doing, but just can’t seem to find the time to fit into our busy schedules.

Well, it’s time to face the facts, in order to take control of our finances we all need to know where we spend our money each month.

It sounds great on paper, but putting it into practice can be such a chore.  Writing down every transaction is tedious and sometimes we’re in such a hurry that we can’t be bothered to spend the time to start budgeting.  It always seems to be one of those things we’ll get to next month, but next month never really comes.

Well for those of us with jam packed schedules that can’t fit anything else into our day, we have a solution: Mint.com.

Mint.com is a handy online service which does all of the record keeping for you.  Saving you time and energy that can be better spent with our loved ones or a relaxing hobby.

I’m going to be completely honest.  I have never had any love for budgeting.  Doing it the old-fashioned way in a logbook was time-consuming and often didn’t accurately reflect my spending habits.  But once I started using Mint.com several  years ago I was hooked.

It’s a surprisingly intuitive service which collects all of your information from your banks, brokerages, and credit card companies so that you have all of your financial information in one place.  Mint.com even imports and names all of your transactions.  It will tell you where each transaction took place and it automatically categorizes the transaction into the appropriate category.  In short, it makes personal finance dead simple.

I’ve tried out other products such as Yodlee, Quicken, and Excel to track my finances but I keep coming back to Mint.com for its ease of use and simplicity.