Budgeting with Mint.com
Over the holidays this year I sat down to work on my 2012 budget in Mint.com, my favorite online financial service. Unlike previous years where I had budgets in Mint, I tried to make this one reasonable and obtainable. Historically, I have used mint.com for hindsight review rather than proactive budgeting (some of that was due to living in three apartments in the last year, including a move from Washington, DC to San Francisco, CA without updating the budgets).
This whole processing has lead to reaffirm my biggest grip with Mint’s budgeting and to ask a very basic budgeting question.
First, I still cannot believe that in 2012 Mint does not have the ability to set annual budgets. For example, I want an annual budget for things like clothing, travel, and gifts. For the life of me I cannot figure out a workaround to create one. As a result, I am left with keeping these outside of Mint in a spreadsheet. Thats a manual effort that shouldn’t be required. Anyone have any suggestions?
Second, while I have outlined my day-to-day spending in a detailed manner I have also included budgets for my “fixed costs” (those that do not fluctuate from month to month - rent & car payment). In my mind it makes sense to include these, however since these payments tend to be front-loaded in the month it skews the progress bar as soon as these payments are recorded in Mint to make it look like I’m off budget until the very end of the month. While I understand the visual result is due to these payments, it still requires me to look into the various budgets set to see if my variable costs are still on target. So my question to you: do you include your fixed cost structure in your mint budgets, or leave them out?
