Use Mint.com to Manage Your Personal Finances and Family Budget

Times are tight. How are we Americans to deal with the recent loss of savings and rising cost of living, on top of the already-challenging demands of every day life? Whatever, your situation, being organized and intelligent about your personal family finances is essential. Are you currently using Quicken or Microsoft Money to do so? How often do you balance your checkbook? If you are using software tools consistently, excellent – that means you are committed to organizing your finances. I have something even better for you though. I recently signed up with Mint.com, a free web-based money management tool. There are a few other similar programs, including Wesabe, Geezeo, and Dimetracker.com, which I haven’t used, so I cannot speak for them. After 16 weeks of use, I am a huge fan of Mint, and here is why.

1. Ease of Use: Within 10 minutes, I setup my Mint account, and added several bank, loan and investment accounts, including a business expense account. I’ve written another entry in the Blueliner Marketing blog about how Mint.com defines the best of web 2.0.

2. Intelligent Categorization: Mint automatically categorizes your transactions pretty accurately. In another 30 minutes, I was able to customize categories and reassign vendors to new categories. The ability to add tags and rules on any expense is fantastic, empowering Mint to better recognize and bucket expenses properly in the future.

3. Simple Budgeting & Spending Trends: Using Mint’s Trend Charts, I was amazed by how much money I spent “eating out” at restaurants! I was also able to see how my spending in certain categories compared to others in New York, where I work. Within 10 minutes, I setup monthly budgets on specific categories, like eating out, groceries and transportation. At any point throughout the month, when I login, my Mint Dashboard shows me if I’m on or ahead of pace on my budgets, which helps me make adjustments. Where do you think you may be spending beyond your means? Have you ever broken out the interest portion of your credit payments to see what they’re really charging? Mint can help you do that. Whether you are experiencing hard financial times or not, tracking budgets and viewing your spending trends will help you make good decisions.

4. Aggregating Accounts: I know that this may not be a time that you want to look at your investment accounts, but one thing is for sure – having all of your accounts aggregated in one interface has never been this easy. If you are using 401kid’s ESP Wizard to get advice on the best 529 Plans and Coverdell ESAs, now you can add those accounts to your Mint dashboard to track them.

So how does this apply to parenting and your children’s future? Well, Mint could be an extremely useful tool for educating teens on money management. I would even argue that kids should be exposed to real world numbers as early as 9 or 10 years old. You could add your children’s debit cards and college savings accounts to your Dashboard and tag expenses related to education or your kids. For example, tags like “video games”, “soccer team”, “books” and “school supplies” will give you a good indication of how much you are investing in these areas. Mint’s blog publishes an interesting article about family budgeting.

Further, by setting budgets with your kids, encouraging them to use pre-paid debit cards and saving receipts from cash spending, you will achieve invaluable benefits, including:

1. Facilitating the financial education of your kids, something that they won’t learn in school – not even in college! Why K-12 and college education do not teach more practical life skills like personal finance is a whole other matter, which we will address another time.
2. Monitoring their spending, which is much easier through Mint than online banking or reviewing paper bank statements.
3. Developing the qualities of self-sufficiency and responsibility, by having them track their own budgets, from whatever they ‘earn’ through work or allowance. They will learn the true value of the dollar when the see how easily it flows out – for example “wow, we spent $1,500 on video games and toys last year?” Also, to see how their own credit accounts charge interest can be a painful and useful lesson – the earlier learned, the better.
4. Sharpening their real world math skills. Now you have an answer to the age-old question of young students in Algebra classes – ‘how am I ever going to use this stuff in the real world?’

I can think of 100 good reasons why you should use Mint or one of the other noted web-based money management soultions, to not only organize the family finances but also to provide what is probably the third most important area of non-formal education that is essential for your children’s development – behind 1) character education and 2) health education.

So what are you waiting for? Get on Mint and report back. I’d like to hear from parents and teens who are using Mint particularly as a mechanism to educate kids on money management.

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