So you want to get your financials back on track along with me but don’t know where to start? It can seem so overwhelming looking at pages of bank transactions, trying to remember where every little transaction went. Or maybe you have an excel spreadsheet that you painstakingly transfer all of your purchases into to keep track of? If only there were a simpler way to track transactions and budget! Well, I have one for you!
Let me start by saying that this article is not sponsored in any way, not even an affiliate link, I just genuinely love how much these guys have helped me with my finances and wanted to share them! They’re Mint, a company by Inuit (Same people who make Quickbooks and TurboTax), and how they work is quite simple. You give them read-only access to your banking and they import every transaction you do and categorize it. You can also, more prevalently to this blog, make custom budgets for each and every category, even making your own categories. So I’ll show how it works.
Set-up
So when you first get to the Mint homepage it will look something like this:
From here you click “Sign Up” in the upper right
You then fill in your details and click “Create Account”
After this, it will ask you basic questions including country and ZIP/Postal Code. Following this, you will have to log in to your online banking, loan account, credit cards, etc. It is quite time-consuming when you first do it, but once you do it once you don’t need to again.
Tracking Transactions
So once all of this has been completed you will come to a screen that looks like this:
This is where all the magic happens. For a more in-depth breakdown of where these numbers are from for me, you can check out this update post! You can set budgets, go through your previous transactions and track transactions like a pro! Be careful when assigning categories, however, originally I had dine-out purchases broken down too far, so I was budgeting $5 for bars, $10 for sit-down restaurants, $10 for fast food, etc. Which honestly isn’t necessary for the level of budgeting I personally need. I would rather just budget $50 to “Eating Out” and not worry about if it’s fast food or restaurant.
So that’s about it, I will be going more in-depth on what all is involved in developing a budget you can actually stick to next week! See ya then!
