Mint Makes Budgeting Easier for Non-Accountants

2009-09-11 Andy Wergedal
Original Post: Mint Makes Budgeting Easier for Non-Accountants
Personal financial uber-tool Mint.com added a bundle of new tools for monthly budgeting, irregular expenses and splurges, getting nerdy with spending statistics, and a lot more. Take a look at what's new in a quick screenshot tour.

If you're not familiar with Mint, it's an online expense tracker, budget planner, and account checker that wants you to load everything into it—credit cards, checking and savings accounts, investment holdings, you name it—and learn more about where your money goes. Adam toured an early Mint and declared it mostly ready for your money, I found its iPhone app fairly neat, and Gina just recently stopped being paranoid and started using Mint for help with irregular income management.

Its latest updates and feature additions, which should already be in place for all users, give users more graph and chart information about how they're spending and saving over however much time they want to look. There are also tools to take the calculator and scratch pad out of saving for non-monthly expenses and milestone stuff like vacations. Hit the thumbnails below for a look at what's new in Mint's green, tabbed interface.

Budgets are not longer just pie charts you can look at month by month. Setting your budgets and glancing at current progress is now done in a "Planning" tab, where you determine how much you should spend each month on clothing, restaurants, rent and the like. Here's a big plug to fill the holes in any would-be budgeter's work: steady, but not monthly, expenses. Car insurance, self-employed quarterly tax estimates, membership dues—anything you need to have money socked away for, Mint can work into your budget. Beyond category budgeting, you can get timeline comparisons of your spending at certain merchants, or on any combination of things you've given a single tag. In other words, it's the end of willful ignorance of how much give our bartenders/baristas/sandwich shops each month.

Another timeline tool gives you an "iceberg" look at how much you're making each month compared to how much you're spending. The graph tells the basic story, while the reports, a bit down the page, detail your best and worst months. If you want Mint to keep balances and transactions accessible for some of your accounts or custom tags, but not visible in your day-to-day finances, you can "hide" those accounts with a new settings tool. The data's still collected and accessible, but you can keep credit cards tied to business expenses, costs you'll be reimbursed for, or other non-tangible money out of budgeting or any Mint function.

Mint also added 'rollover' options for budgeting, so living well within your means on, say, coffee spending this month will give you a bit extra to spend next month. Tweaking your monthly budgets or adding expenses also updates graphs and charts in real time in the 'Planning' tab, so you can see what impact socking away that extra $50 per month has on your long-term financial health.

What features or focus are you waiting for Mint to take on before you'll use it (or just use it more)? What's not so great in this update, and what else are you using? Run your mouth about your money (management) in the comments.

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