Even when I purchased candy for Halloween or printed out family photographs, it still shows up as “Pharmacy”. But this can lead to some miscategorization that might make your budget tracking a little more complicated.įor instance, all our purchases from Walgreens are categorized as Pharmacy. Mint is pretty good (but not perfect) at figuring out the correct category for expenses and income based on the vendor. To get into the details of your finances, Mint tracks your transactions and automatically assigns a category for each one. Let’s go through all of these features and how you can use them: Transactions But, Mint can do a lot more than give you a bird’s eye view of your accounts. You can certainly use the dashboard overview to keep an eye on your finances as I do. In short: It’s as secure as checking your accounts on your bank’s website. It also uses measures like multi-factor authentication to help you protect access to your account. The program uses VeriSign to help ensure security for sensitive data transfer. This makes them just as safe as Capital One or Bank of America. Let me assure you that Mint offers the same kind of security you see at an online bank. People are often leery about providing this kind of information online. It’s important to note that you must provide Mint with your login information to access your accounts. I love being able to track my net worth over time. Once you have linked up all of these accounts, Mint allows you to see all of your financial information in one place, including your net worth. It can just take some time to plug in all the necessary information. The user interface for signing up is smooth and easy to use. The more accounts you can link to Mint, the more complete your financial picture will be. Now you can link up to smaller banks, utility companies, and other similar accounts that may not have been linkable in the past. Over the years, Mint has expanded the number and types of accounts it can connect. You can include everything from your bank accounts to your investment and retirement accounts, bills, credit cards, 529 accounts, and real estate purchases. When you sign up with Mint, you provide the program with your financial accounts. The magic of Mint lies in the fact that you can get all of your financial information in a single dashboard. While I use Mint mostly to see the big picture of our money situation, you can do a lot more with the program. This lets me keep an eye on our overall finances without forcing me to do my own calculations. I also love that Mint tracks my net worth. It helps prevent me from mindlessly overspending and allows me to adjust before I get us in the red. I also receive alerts when I have a low balance or when I’ve spent an unexpected amount in a spending category. I check the app about once a week to see how my accounts are doing. This includes our checking and savings accounts, credit cards and other loans, the mortgage, 529 accounts, and all of our investment accounts. With this, I can keep track of all of my family’s financial accounts. I use the free online-based software, and the free smartphone app (available for both Apple and Android). Here’s what you need to know about how Mint can help you take better care of your money: And it’s free!Įven though Mint has been around for quite some time, Intuit works consistently to improve program and be more responsive to budgeters’ needs. With Intuit’s proven track record of simplifying personal finance, Mint has made itself one of the most trusted names in modern budgeting. The program was created by Intuit, who also created Quicken, Quickbooks, and Turbo Tax. If you’d like to give that a try, you can read our Empower review here. They make it easy to keep track of all of my financial accounts.Įditors note: PT now uses Empower to track his net worth. We no longer keep our finances centralized in a single bank. On the other hand, since so much of our finances are handled digitally, it can be harder to keep tabs on it. (If you were lucky enough to have a computer at all!) On the one hand, you no longer have to choose between tracking every penny by hand or firing up the kerosene-powered spreadsheet program to record your income and expenses. Keeping tabs on your finances is both easier and harder than it used to be back in the old days.
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