It's the first of the month, and that means budget time! Sometime in the first few days of the month we sit down and take stock of what happened last month and plan our spending for the new month. Our credit card and checking account expenditures flow to Mint.com on an ongoing basis, so after some quick categorizing on the Mint website, we're ready to look at the totals. A great thing about Mint is the ability to export, so we take the data from Mint and put it in an Excel workbook my husband built, and then take a look at our income and expenses compared to our plan. Next, we discuss what we plan to spend for the new month, enter it in, and we're done. The process probably takes 45 minutes but it's worth it!
Do you have a monthly budgeting process? In the future I'll share more about how we organize and categorize our income and expenses. We've been going through this monthly process for over a year now, and have made some tweaks along the way.
Is it safe giving mint.com your account information?...Catherine.
ReplyDeleteI think it's safe. They have a lot of security safeguards in place. It's important that you use a strong password. Also, since Mint is one central place where you can look at all of your accounts, it might even help you notice more quickly if something weird is happening with one of your credit cards- like charges for something you know you didn't buy.
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