It’s no doubt that in today’s economic environment many people are struggling financially, struggling with unemployment and wishing they were debt free. I know I certainly do! Well, a few weeks ago a friend told me about a website called mint.com, an intuitive personal budgeting web application that helps take all the guesswork out of your budgeting. (We all know how hard it is to guess correctly, right?!) Well, this application shows you your spending trends and helps you in your budgeting process instead of pulling numbers out of thin air. Not only that, it’s a stark reminder every time you open the page of just how far in debt you actually are in addition to showing where you spending the majority of your money. For us, living in San Francisco, it’s also a stark reality to just how high our rent is and how much of our monthly budget goes into our living expenses!
Basically, this web application aggregates all of your online banking into one place (credit cards, bank statements, debit card usage, car loans, student loans, investments, etc) and creates pie charts, and other helpful tools to give you a stand-out visual of your actual financial situation–in real time. There’s a section for budgeting that allows you to set numbers and follow your trends of spending over the months so that you can be more accurate. And here’s a feature that I’m most excited about–whenever you go over your budget in an area, you get an email alert indicating you’re over budget and by how much! It’s a great way to stay on top of your finance!
This tool has some pretty amazing potential, and honestly, could really help a lot of people who are looking to be debt free. It’s something that many churches should seriously look into and consider adding as a resource into their Financial Courses (Good$ense, Financial Peace University, etc.) for helping people get a better handle on and understanding of their spending and their debt. And maybe even best of all… it’s free!
If the biggest barrier to generosity in our churches today is the saddle of debt that we carry around, then this simple web application can certainly go a long way to helping us rid ourselves of debt and walk forward in a new and unparalleled generosity that the world hasn’t seen from us in a long, long time!
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So, I’ve used Microsoft Money before, and they were always so bad about guessing what categories my credit card purchases go into. Have you experienced something better with Mint.com, Aaron?
It’s pretty accurate… some of the discrepancies we’ve seen in categories are when Tracy buys lunch at work it comes up as clothing… but that’s because she works for GAP Inc. Otherwise, there’s only been a few things that we’ve had to change, but the app seems to be pretty intuitive and learns from your changes.
I had to go through all the transactions at first to make sure everything is catergorized correctly, but then it seems to catch on. It all depends on how your bank titles a transaction.
The biggest issue I’ve had with mint is tracking my cash spending… I wish it was possible to manually enter your cash spending as well – we’d have kept using it. Still, it is a fantastic (and free) tool to help keep you aware.
I’m not familiar with Mint, but we’ve been using Quicken for years. We’ve been really happy with it. It tracks your spending, alerts you when you have broken your budget, automatically uploads transactions from credit cards and from your bank account and keeps track of your investments.
All that aside, getting out of debt – whatever strategy you use – is a huge thing. We’ve been intensely going through various programs as a church (especially Dave Ramsey) and it is cool to see how it has freed people.
I’m using money.strands.com that was launched recently, is customizable and easy to use. For me mint.com is confused.