Money Matters
Kaiene
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Mint.com vs Excel
I've been thinking about more closely tracking our budget.
I've seen many people talk about mint.com and excel for this purpose.
What made you choose either of those? Does mint.com cost anything? How much time do you think you spend tracking your budget?
TIA
Re: Mint.com vs Excel
I vote Excel.
Mainly because my bank does not work with mint.com because of its security features. Also because I can completely personalize everything - I don't have to go in depth with areas I don't care about and I can get really detailed in other areas.
Once you get Excel set up for you it works really nicely.
I used Mint for a while (it's free) but it didn't work for me like I wanted. It just tracks debit purchases and can't split them up. For example, if I spent $100 at the grocery store, but $70 was on food and $30 was on household supplies, it will still just track $100 at the grocery store. I like to keep a more detailed budget, so excel is better for me.
Actually, you can split purchases. You just click on it and click "split."
I use mint.com. I really like it, and I think I'm too lazy to keep an excel spreadsheet up to date. I like that mint does all of the work for me.
Actually, I use both mint.com and an Excel spreadsheet. Mint makes it easy for me to get monthly running totals of what we've spent each month without having to enter each receipt anywhere.The only purchases I ever need to split are from Target, and Mint makes that easy too.
But Excel allows me to see the whole year at one glance with year-to-date stuff like monthly average and totals. I just take the end of month numbers from Mint and put them in Excel.
Mint keeps me on track during the month, and Excel helps me with the annual budget.
ETA: Mint doesn't cost anything, but it also doesn't work for everyone because some smaller banks and financial institutions aren't accessible. Also, some people still have trouble getting ING to work properly with Mint.
About a month ago, however, we started using something called Mojito. My husband found it as a "template" on Google Docs. Mojito is a Google spreadsheet that lets us import our transactions from mint (I don't mean "export from mint, then import into the spreadsheet", I mean it actually imports everything directly from mint!). So now we can use mint to collect all of our bank data, see the cool pie charts and stuff. But when we want to get down to business, we have all of our transactions in Mojito so we can slice and dice our finances however we want. Really neat. Oh, I almost forgot the best part!! You can create budgets in Mojito based on multiple categories and tags! My husband nearly flipped when he saw it could do tags. Now we can use tags to track our savings goals in one money market account (without having to use one account per savings goal -- stupid mint). So flexible. Very cool. So ladies (and gents), if you want to OWN your finances, this thing rocks. You can find Mojito by googling for "mint mojito spreadsheet", or here's the direct link: http://b3devs.blogspot.com/p/about-mojito.html
We use Excel. I tried Mint but I felt like it was too much work when I could more easily craft my own spreadsheet. Excel is just faster for me.
Make a pregnancy ticker
Both. I love the mint for budget tracking and seeing everything in a snapshot.
I use an excel sheet I made to keep track of checking more closely, and what's coming out and when. I also have a tab I estimated our debt snowball and can put in what we're actually paying off each month, it's pretty close to acurate and encouraging to look at!