Budgeting App Review: Mint.com
Budgeting can be a tedious process, especially when you are hard-pressed to find time to enter your expenditures at the end of each week or month. Even then, if you wait too long, you might overspend without realizing it.
I was having this issue while using an excel spreadsheet for budgeting. Because I had to manually enter receipts and other expenditures, I would put off clocking in until it was too late. With this in mind, I went in search of a budgeting iPhone application that would, at the very least, allow me to enter expenditures on-the-fly.
I stumbled upon Intuit’s Mint.com software. It’s a downloadable app that securely connects with your debit and credit accounts, categorizing various expenditures and incomes as they come in.
For one, the app is incredibly easy to navigate. At the top of your Updates page, you can review recent transactions from all of your connected accounts. It’s helped me regularly check for fraudulent activity because I can quickly check through recent purchases on all of my cards without signing into separate accounts.
Below that, the app reminds you of the categories in which you are close to overspending. If you click for a closer look, you will see all of your budget categories stacked as vertical bars on top of each other. The bars allow you to visually note how much remains in each budget category, while directly above each bar, you can quickly check the numerical value of the remaining amount. On top of all the categories, the app also notes how much you have spent in total, and how much you have remaining in total.
Along similar lines, a wonderful aspect of Mint is that it allows you to develop a highly differentiated budget. When you’re setting up your account, you choose which categories you would like to include in your budget, anything from “Rental Car & Taxi” to “Coffee Shops”. The app also makes recommendations based on your spending habits in previous months. The only budget that it doesn’t include is a category for “Savings”. We always recommend that you budget for savings ahead of time, and make deposits at the beginning, rather than end, of the month. To get around this, I budgeted for a random category, which I know is my Savings budget.
After you have determined your budget categories, and the amount of money allotted to each, future purchases or bill payments are automatically categorized. You can move purchases between categories, though in my experience, Mint is fairly good at automatic categorization. In this way, I don’t have to manually enter purchases, and I can quickly see how much I have left to spend.
In addition to each of these features, the app tracks your cash flow so you can see, based on your income and expenditures, whether you are coming out with a positive or negative flow. They also track your spending trends, allowing you to make between-category as well as between-month comparisons, and you can opt to have a free credit check done. Finally, if you have trouble remembering to pay certain bills, you can create bill payment reminders.
Of course, at the end of the day, my big concern was security. Aside from receiving overwhelmingly positive user reviews, Mint outlines how their level of security is comparable to that of a financial institution. Notably, your email is the only identity information linked to your log-in information. So if your username or password is stolen, no one can steal your bank account information. All of your bank account information is stored in Mint.com’s servers in a highly secure location that is incredibly difficult to access. To top it all off, Mint.com is owned by Intuit, giving it the backing and stability of a major organization.
Overall, I would highly recommend the app to anyone looking to simplify their budgeting process, especially if you don’t have an overwhelmingly large number of accounts that you regularly draw from. Mint also has an online platform, is available for the iPad, and is available for both Android and Windows phones. If you have any of your own app recommendations, let us know in the comments below so we can check them out as well!
