The 4 Step Quickstart to Budgeting on Mint
If you’re on this article, I’m going to assume that you know what Mint is and the reasons to use it. In case you do not know, Mint is an app that lets you link all of your credit card and bank accounts and view your spending in one, central location.
As someone new to budgeting or just new to Mint, the barrage of features can be daunting to navigate at first. In this “Quickstart” guide, I hope to provide you with 4 easy steps to start using the Mint most effectively and not waste time with the less useful features.
1. Link Your Spending Accounts
This is pretty obvious, the goal of using Mint is to track your spending! For me, this included my checking account (which I only use to pay rent), all my credit cards, and Venmo (more on this later).
One concern with linking your checking/bank account is credit card payments (we obviously want to track the individual credit card transactions, not the monthly lump-sum credit card payment). Mint does a pretty good job of identifying when a transaction is actually a credit card payment and will mark it as a “Transfer,” hiding it from your budget reports and charts.
2. Picking a Set of Categories
As with any other budgeting app, Mint allows you to categorize each transaction. In Mint, it provides you with certain preset categories, allowing you to add custom ones as needed. The problem is, they provide you with an overwhelming number of default categories.
My recommendation is to form a set of ~10–20 categories (either custom-made or preset) to model your spending. Don’t worry if each category is a perfect descriptor for the expenses included under the category — all that matters is that you know what each category represents. Think of each category as representing an aspect of your life — if I look at your set of categories, I should be able to get some sense of your lifestyle and what is important to you.
For example, my Food and Dining section consists of 4 sub-categories: Boba, Coffee Shops, Groceries, and Restaurants. My boba/coffee shops budgets are only $20 and $60 a month (respectively), but I know these are areas of spending that can easily get out of hand and require close monitoring.
3. Tracking Your Spending
Now that we have our system set up, it’s time to track the spending!
The way you interact with your budget is up to you, but I recommend a weekly check-in. During this weekly check-in, go through all the new transactions and check that the categorization, date, and description (sometimes the transaction descriptions can be a bit weird when synced in Mint) are all correct.
Once we have a personalized subset of categories picked out, recategorizing new transactions should become much easier. However, as you’re starting out, you may find that the categories you picked do not line up perfectly with your spending habits — it’s totally okay (and highly recommended!) to adapt your categories as you learn more about your spending.
Changing the date is particularly important towards the end of a month, when a credit card transaction that happened on March 31, for example, shows up as April 1, due to a delay in the settlement.
4. Setting Budgets
A lot can be said about the concept of budgets/budgeting, so I’ll try to stick to the essentials here.
A popular alternative to Mint, YNAB (You Need a Budget), is praised for its approach to budgeting — allocating every single dollar of income to a specific purpose. While Mint isn’t built with this framework in mind, it is very easy to achieve a similar effect.
To start, we’ll need to know how much income we’ll make each month. For some, this is more variable than others, but try your best and take a more conservative average. Then, in order from most essential to least essential, set a budget for each of your categories, doing your best to estimate the amount of money you need to/will spend in each category.
If you still have money left over, consider if you were too conservative in any of your other categories. Otherwise, a good choice would be to allocate all the leftover dollars to savings/investments, or even charity if you’re feeling generous. Regardless, the important thing is to allocate every dollar into a category. This will prevent certain dollars from just “disappearing”.
What Next?
Congratulations! If you went through each of these steps, you are well on your way to taking control of your spending. However, it would be too easy if this was all there is to it. As I write more articles, I’m hoping to dive deeper into various aspects we touched on in this article.
