Budgeting is the worst. As a financial advisor, I personally find it difficult to budget. We have a toddler whose sole focus is the perpetual destruction of our home. After work and parenting, my wife and I do not spend as much focus on finances as we (probably) should.
Outside of my previous disdain, budgeting is core to good financial health. A famous line from Peter Drucker is “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
Enter Mint. The program is free and is owned by intuit, maker of the Turbo Tax and Quickbooks software. We signed up and hooked all of our financial accounts to the program(credit union accounts, vehicle loans, investment accounts, credit cards, etc). Aggregating all of our accounts together in one spot allows our household to get a much better understanding of all of the moving pieces within our finances.
The nice part about the automation aspect is that for most businesses, it will categorize where the money is spent. For the small businesses we shop at that are not in the Mint database, we manually select the budget category which the website remembers for all future purchases. Here is an outline of how we got started with Mint:
Month 1-3: Measuring
We let Mint organize our purchases and data while periodically checking that the places we spent our money were categorized correctly. This timeframe allowed the program to create an average budget for each category that would be accurate month-to-month and not impacted by a one-time large purchase.
Month 4+: Behaviour Changes
At this point, we had a strong idea of our money coming in and how much was spent in each category. We learned that we had spent a shocking amount at restaurants. An amount so upsetting I’d prefer not to disclose here.
Using our spending habits from the first three months, we were able to set a realistic budget within Mint. We also set-up email reminders warning us when we were nearing our spending in a particular category and another email reminder when we had surpassed it.
Overall
Mint has been extremely helpful in curtailing certain spending behaviour. If you have a spouse, it does not matter if you have separate bank accounts – still works great! Run your finances like a business and enjoy all the benefits down the road. Also, we are not paid any type of endorsement, I just wanted to share what worked for me. However, if someone from Mint is reading this, I would happily accept an endorsement cheque – our contact details are located here.
Do you have any budgeting tips, tricks, or software? Drop us a line, we always like hearing what works for people!
