How to Budget Using Mint

If you do not want to pay for a budgeting tool and are not using Mint then you are making a big mistake.  Mint allows you to create a zero based budget, track and categorize your transactions, and create and track goals for your finances.  This article will concentrate on how I use Mint to create a zero based budget.

The first item when creating your budgets is deciding what you need to budget for and creating a budget for them on the budget page on Mint's homepage.  When creating a budget you need to know what your allocation for that expense is going to be.  Another selection you have is selecting if you want the budget to roll over to the next month.  While this is an awesome feature I do not use it since I create a new budget for each month.



After you have created your budgets the next thing is you need to go through your old transactions and label them the category they would not fall into on your budget.  When doing this select the option to always rename ________ as ___________ and to always categorize it as what you just selected.  This allows Mint when you have a transaction to label most of them in your budget so you do not have to go back through all of the time.

Next you need to look at the right side of the budget page and it will show you what you have left over for the month.  You need to remember this value.  Next I list the items I want to start saving for.  These are my goals for Mint.  You need to select the goals page for these items.  Now I only have so much money left over so I allot it to my goals.  Mint can track your goals as well as keeping up with your progress.  I allocate the rest of my income into the goals.  I do not use the tracking feature as each month has different features so I need to save different amounts in my goals but I do like the fact that is separates your goals from your expenses.  This allows you to see that you are not just spending all of your money but you are saving it for a purpose.

Mint has so many cool features that I do not used based on how I want my budget to work but they might be features that you want to use.  I encourage you to experiment it because it is my favorite financial tool.