Thrifty Thursday – Setting Budgets with the help of Mint

Happy Thursday people! As I mentioned yesterday, I would share how we budget and a tool that has been super helpful for us – Mint.

What is Mint?

Mint is a personal finance app that allows you to link banking accounts, loans, credit card accounts, etc. in order to assist you track spending, set savings goals (and helping achieve those goals) and give an overview of your financial health.

How We use Mint

I would say mostly for budgeting purposes. Tracking our spending habits and also getting a better picture of our month to month finances. I did check out the goals tab to set up the kids tuition “goal”. We would love to save money for kids tuition a year ahead of time (obviously we’ll set aside more if possible not just a year in advance, but that is one of our main goals!). We also have a goal of saving 12% of our monthly income each month. Cars are next on our goals list. We currently have no car payments, but know one of the cars will need to be replaced soon.

How we set our budget

I’ve chatted about this before. I have a master budget excel file that gets updated every year. We have the big categories/buckets:

Home
Car
Insurance
Food
Children
Entertainment
Gifts & Donations
Personal Care
Business (blog, invite, flowers)

Within each main category or “bucket” are sub categories (changed some numbers in here for privacy)

In order to fill these in, my husband and I sit down and thoroughly review/write down any recurring expenses (we use the prior 6 months to help us plan ahead), try to REALISTICALLY (this is important!) plan what expenses we might incur, write down any credit card information (I want to note, we try our best never to use credit cards – we’ve had unexpected BIG repairs last year where we were able to utilize 0% interest options, so we update that info and when the promotion will drop off in order to pay the remaining balance from our emergency savings fund). We also write down our goals, what are we looking to pay off, pay for, save for, etc.

The realistic approach is key. You will see $200 per month allotted for car maintenance. We are NOT paying $200 per month instead, we are estimating $2,400 in repairs for the year. We came up with this estimate thinking through some average costs (oil change, tire rotation, any service or part needed) and you will see it illustrated below as we just had a major maintenance expense. Overall, we don’t WANT to hit that big number, but it is there and accounted for and we can handle the expense!

Also, my gas and electric bills prices alternate. Higher gas bills in the winter, lower in the summer – I just try to take the realistic average when coming up with the monthly spend. You don’t have to be 100% accurate on variable bills, you just need to realistically set that number so you can make sure you save for it!

I still love keeping the master file up to date because it’s nice to have. It gives me a nice overview of what to expect in a month and also allows me to compare year over year quickly. It also made things really easy when using the budget feature in Mint. I was able to reference that document and “plug and chug” all the information. Made the budget allocation process SO easy!

Here’s how my budget from above looks in Mint…

As you can see below, (just sharing a handful of categories so you get the picture)- this is what I’m working with. I LOVE that the transactions pull straight from your bank account/accounts with Mint.

As you can see, these auto populated from the transaction list and fell into their appropriate category (will show you how to do that below). Green shows you are within budget and red shows you items you are over budget on. For example, we had to get new tires on one of the cars and it needed some work done. We allotted $200 per month for car maintenance ($2,400 a year) we now have $900 left budgeted for the year.

Also, school tuition is broken down quarterly here. I’m still playing with having it show the right amount for twice a year payments. You will see in our excel sheet above, we set a budget of $167 in tuition as a holding for how much per month we want to save for next years’ tuition. As I mentioned, we are trying to stay ahead of the curve here and stockpile as much as we can.

Here’s How the Transaction List Looks in Mint…

This is a list of transactions from December. I go through and categorize the transaction using the drop down menu on each transaction and it is then automatically funneled into that specific budget – what we saw above. You can add as many categories as you need to suit you!

These transactions are now categorized and automatically funnel into your specified budget, which you can see an overview of the month on that tab.

How Budgeting and Mint help us achieve our financial goals

Mint is an incredible resource and has many more features available that will assist you in meeting your financial goals. Our goal this year was to save 12% of our monthly income and Mint will allow us to see quickly if we are achieving that goal!