My Favorite Budgeting App Mint.com - A Tutorial (1 of 3)

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll give you a quick tour of the program that I use for budgeting, Mint.com. This is the first of a 3 part series on how I use Mint.

I’ve been compulsively keeping a budget since I was in college. My parents made it a mission to spend as little money as possible when i was growing up, so I guess some of that rubbed off on me. I'm also someone who loves systems, tracking things, and data -- so budgeting is a natural fit for me.

Obviously, the technology has improved a lot in 25 years. My favorite software used to be Microsoft Money, but they phased that out years ago, which is when I switched over to Mint.com. Mint has some real advantages and some annoying drawbacks, but having tried many of the alternatives, I’m convinced it’s the best thing out there at the moment for my needs. I have two separate videos where I share my likes and dislikes, but first let me tell you why I need a tool like Mint.

I use Mint for budgeting. I don’t use it to pay bills, I don’t use it to keep track of my investments, and I don’t use it to track or pay down debt. I only use it for monthly and annual budgeting. If you are looking for information on any of those other functions, you are not going to find it here. For me, here what Mint does in a nutshell. It:
Takes all of the transactions from your checking and savings accounts and all of your credit cards and creates read only connections with each of these accounts. It then
pulls in and consolidates all of your transactions in a single place
allows you to categorize each transaction with the proper budget category
allows you to create a budget
does budget reporting by month or by a custom time interval
allows you to export all of your transactions so that you can manipulate them outside of mint in a spreadsheet