My New Obsession

As if I really needed something else to distract me online, I've recently become a fan of a certain website.  A money-management website.  As you may recall, I'm often thinking about money, specifically the Swans money situation and how we're handling it.  I never did jump on the Dave Ramsey band wagon and I've really just had this vague idea in my head as to how we're going to navigate our financial future.  But I have a new plan.  I have a budget thanks to mint.com.

Mint.com is similar to Quicken, which we have on our home computer, but for some reason, I love mint.com so much more. For one thing, you can log on to it from any computer and you’re emailed weekly updates. Here's the skinny - you enter all your bank accounts (savings, checking, credit cards, 401Ks, IRAs, etc.) and then mint.com lays out your complete financial picture. You can even add any cars you own, your mortgage, and the like. Mint.com clearly sets out how much cash is in your pocket versus the amount of debt you're carrying.

The most eye-opening aspect for me is seeing exactly where our money is going. Mint.com categorizes all of your transactions so that you can view how much you spend in each category each month. For example, my $70 trip to Kroger goes under "groceries" and my $2 coffee goes under "coffee shop", and both "groceries" and "coffee shop" are under the bigger umbrella of "Food & Dining." You have to manually fix some of the categorizations, but then going forward mint.com remembers the categories for a particular merchant. So step one for me was making sure all the categorizations were correct and then viewing our spending habits over the past three months. I will only say that I am utterly amazed and quite embarrassed about the amount of money we spend on Food & Dining. It is not right. I would tell you, but you really don’t want to know. And I thought I did a good job cooking at home a lot! Well our $60 dinner here, $12 Saturday coffee shop run there and $5 subway lunches all adds up to a HUGE chunk of change. I also spend a lot of money on groceries. Mr. Cob has been saying for a while that I overspend at the grocery store and we end up throwing out maybe 20-30% of the things we buy because they go bad before we can eat them. Well after seeing the proof in the numbers, I fear he's right.

So mint.com is here to help. It assisted me in creating a budget and we're going to try to stick to it. I think it will take a few months to get the hang of it, but the first step is knowing you have a problem and taking the necessary action to fix it! And now that I've set up our budget, I get an email from mint.com if we've gone over budget in any category. For example, we're already $47 over on Bills & Utilities for the month, so in order to defray that overage, I'm going to cut down in another category - perhaps Food & Dining. My goal is to use mint.com to help us reduce some of our spending so that we can (1) pay off our roof/credit cards ASAP and (2) build up at least 6 months of living expenses in our savings account. Here’s to money management!