

I once worked for a woman who had the uncanny ability of getting her computer to freeze. We still look at Mint at the end of the month as a good overview, but during the month, it’s not active enough to influence our spending habits. We’ve tried the passive approach in the past, and we go over budget every single time. We need that hands-on budgeting experience. We quickly enter the expense in our app, and it reminds us where we are for the month.
#BALANCE FORECASTING MINT MANUAL#
There’d be no pain.īut with our manual budgeting app, we have a reason to check it each and every time we spend money. I need to be reminded, “Yes, Joanna, you just spent money on a Costco-sized bag of Starbursts.” And unless we checked Mint every day and categorized our expenses, our budgeting would be passive, rather than active. We need to enter that expense into our budget ourselves. But Johnny and I need to do more than just swipe a plastic card every time we spend money. With Mint, we don’t feel the hurt of each expense. And while the phrase still doesn’t make me want to go run a marathon, I think it applies pretty well to how Johnny and I approach budgeting. It left a lasting impression only because it seemed kind of dramatic.

I remember a poster that used to hang in the exercise room at my house growing up. We know lots of people do, including some of you, but Johnny and I have found a few sticking points with Mint that we just can’t seem to shake. But even though Mint seems like the ultimate budgeting app, we don’t actually use it for budgeting. We use it to see our account balances at the end of each month and to record them on a trusty spreadsheet that tracks our net worth. We wondered what kind of witchcraft had made a site that compiled all of our moneys and put them in one place - automagically? We were stunned, giddy, and way too excited about something so nerdy.īut for how excited we were for Mint, we haven’t ended up using it as frequently as we thought we would. Johnny and I both have Mint on our phones, and we he looks at it a few times a month. I remember when Johnny and I first heard about Mint a few years ago.
