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.
Not crazy about Mint...
I find that Mint doesn't do a complete accurate job of tracking my finances. For instance, since I get paid on the 15th and on the last day of the month, I feel like it's difficult to accurately track my spending.
On the last day of the month, I always pay my rent for the next month. Like on July 31st, I'll be paying August's rent.
I also pay ahead of schedule on other bills. I love doing that because I feel like it shows the companies that I'm responsible. Plus I love the feeling of being responsible and paying my bills ahead of time.
Anyway, Mint thinks that I'm overspending. And I'm really not. According to Mint, I should be broke and in the hole. But I'm not. It drives me nuts.
Does anyone else experience this issue? How do I get around it?
Re: Not crazy about Mint...
Do you have a budget set up with Mint? If you set up the budget to say, spend $60/month on electricity, but then the bill came and it was $70 (which you can't help all that much, each month is different) Mint is automatically going to send an email that says you "overspent" because you exceeded what you told it you budgeted.
I like Mint overall, but it doesn't do a very good job categorizing spending so I'll get an email that says I overspent on groceries by $500 or something, and I'll freak out and then look at what they're talking about and it turns out that they lumped a random Target purchase in with the grocery budget, even though I could have bought something like deck furniture or whatever.
It definitely has its flaws, but overall I think it's okay.
I do, yep. It just drives me crazy though because Mint doesn't take into consideration that one of my paychecks is used to pay bills for the next month.
Like under income, I list what I bring home each month. But I use my second paycheck on the last day of each month to cover my bills and living expenses until the 15th of the next month. Then I use the 15th paycheck to cover the rest until the end of the month.
It drives me nuts! I wish I just had ONE paycheck that came in at the first of the month. I could pay all my bills at one time instead of splitting them up per paycheck. If I could do that, then I feel like it would be easier to keep track of my spending trends and whatnot.
I tried using Mint for a while and found I had too many problems to really make it worth my while. I did have a lot of problems with the categories, and sometimes I would make my own, but I live close to a really nice Super Target and do a lot of grocery/misc./sometimes clothes shopping there, so that made it difficult to keep track of expenses because for Mint always just categorized it as "shopping."
I also had login problems with some of my student loans, so that similarly made it difficult.
I go in and split up the bill if I got things from separate budgets at walmart/target/etc. So I take the bill and see I spend $15 on house supplies, $10 on pet, etc. You click on the transaction and then the split button to put them into their categories. You can only do this after it went through (not depending).
It takes some work, and I login everyday or every other day to keep on top of what it's categorizing everything. But I like seeing where we are at on each budget.
I personally love mint. I check it every few days and adjust the transactions as necessary. This includes changing the way they are categorized, splitting and categorizing transactions, and changing the dates of transactions.
You may find it helpful to change the date of your paycheck from the last day of the month to the next day - the first day of the month. Or change the date of yuor rent payment to the first of the month.
I use Mint and although I agree it has flaws, it's working out alright for us. Do you use the "roll over" option for your budgets? It makes your under- or over-spending carry over from one month to the next. I find that for expenses that are not always regular or things that don't get charged in the correct month (as you experience), it evens out that way.