So for about ten days now I've been playing around with the budgeting app Mint (along with a Google Sheets yearly budget template and a lot of manual work with a calculator, a calendar, and a succession of blank Google Docs because that's just the kind of person I am), and so obviously I have some Thoughts.
* I picked Mint because it's the budgeting app all the financial reviewers talk about, because it's run by Intuit who also own TurboTax so I knew their security and interface would be good, and because it does not come with built-in shaming over any of your ~unnecessary~ purchases.
* Mint is a free app which makes its money by offering you sponsored ads for financial products it thinks you might like, and getting paid by the advertisers when you accept one of the ads. The most intrusive location for these ads is on your dashboard, feed, whatever you want to call it, where the ad tile is required to be the third tile down and cannot be shuffled to the bottom or turned off.
* (There is also a desktop browser version, Mint.com. I have poked it very slightly but couldn't get it to do anything useful. More on that later. I don't remember noticing how the ads are arranged there.)
* The app's general design is very sleek and intuitive, what I'd expect from the parent company of QuickBooks and TurboTax. Other than the intrusive ad tile, it lets you rearrange everything however you want.
* Mint is designed around importing transactions from your bank account for you to do budgetary stuff at, so obviously security is really important, which gives Intuit an edge up on the competition because I'm already used to trusting them with my tax returns. It only seems to sync new transactions during banking hours, which for someone like me who does most of their shopping on Sunday is kind of frustrating. It also won't let you edit or recategorize a transaction till it's finished "processing" a day or two down the line. I don't know if these pitfalls are common to all budget apps but it would probably make sense if they are.
* One thing Mint does that's incredibly handy for me is it lets you put all your recurring bills in one place and even sync them with your phone calendar. I actually had to turn off the phone calendar sync because it was alerting me constantly on the day before payday when I couldn't do anything about the bill that was due on payday, but if you can find the setting to change the alert frequency it might be useful. And having a nice chronological list of what the fuck is due when, is extremely helpful to my brain, because previously I was trying to remember everything in my head and I kept losing bills.
* Going down my tiles as I have them sorted in the app, I don't have much to say about that list of transactions itself, except that you can recategorize them and split them into different categories -- which is handy if the rent included $105 late fees which you don't want befuckening your future averages, or if you bought groceries and also a barbecue lighter at Walmart, to take two recent examples.
* You cannot, unfortunately, rename or edit categories. On desktop only, you can supposedly add categories, but you cannot then use those categories in any of Mint's other functions, which really defeats the purpose. And their ideas of what categories you might need are pretty... idiosyncratic, not to say WASPy, so e.g. I'm currently categorizing Patreon income under "Reimbursement" because the other options were things like "Investment Income" and "Returned Purchase". And transfers to my savings account can either be "Credit Card Payment" or "Transfer for Cash Spending".
* (I suppose I could put my savings under "Investment: Deposit" or something similarly grandiose, but that seems like... a lot for the 31 cents rounded up from getting a pizza at Little Caesars.)
* Anyways. So then, after the obligatory ad tile, comes a nice colorful pie chart of my spending for the month, which I can open up and tab through to look at all the categories. I saw one finance blogger saying you should use the Miscellaneous category for some things rather than getting too granular, but I like seeing the little individual entries for my haircut and my cloth mask and my pharmacy copay. (That last one's going to be a more substantial pie slice now that I can actually afford to start taking most of my meds again. Turns out my prescription for diabetic test strips expired, though, so I have to get ahold of my doctor and get a new one sent over, and I'm looking skeptically at the copays. :P I've been ignoring my diabetes since January, it can wait a little longer till I'm financially caught up from COVID.)
* I can see list-style breakdowns by category and merchant, too. This is one of the few places in the mobile app that my income shows up, other than the actual paycheck transactions. The desktop version has some more places to budget projected income, but the handling is clunky as hell.
* Next up is the tile where I've been spending a lot of my time, Budgets. This is your basic "envelope method" where you create, say, a budget for haircuts and another one for groceries. Each budget has to be for one of Mint's pre-created categories, and when you have a spending transaction in that category, it puts the expense against that Budget. The desktop version has you also creating a line item for expected income in Budgets, and then becoming stroppy when you attempt to adjust parts in the wrong order, so I prefer the app which simply tells you e.g. that you have spent $900 of an allocated $1000 with an airy unconcern for whether the $1000 has arrived in your bank account yet.
* My single biggest frustration with Mint is that you cannot create Budgets based on user-created categories, nor can you delete, rename, or even collapse categories in the list. So if I go to create a new Budget for, say, "Housewares" to account for the $1 barbecue lighter I finally bought (I have large hands and a tall jar candle that has burned down farther than I can reach, okay, it was a necessity), then I'm stuck scrolling all the way up and down past "Investment: Capital Gains" and "Kids: Child Support" before finally settling on "Home Supplies" because it doesn't really seem like a "Home Furnishings".
* After Budgets comes Accounts, which just shows me my current net worth across all my accounts. I actually unlinked my savings account because it was confusing the hell out of me to see a 31-cent transfer out of checking paired with the same 31-cent transfer into savings, so this doesn't show me anything I can't get through my bank app, but if I had current credit card debt or non-retirement investment accounts it might be more useful.
* (I have not linked my 401(k) to Mint. I haven't even figured out how to get into my 401(k), either before or after it transferred to a different handler a couple months back. I feel like those are problems for a later time than "okay how much groceries can I buy and still pay the rent".)
* On the desktop version of Mint, you can also put things like your car in under your net worth as Property. I tried that, found that I both did not believe their Kelly Blue Book valuation at all (it didn't have any option to take into account "was totaled two years ago and looks it but still mostly runs") and that I find it extremely stressful to have non-liquid property listed as part of my net worth. Interesting to know. You learn all sorts of shit about yourself when you try to manage money.
* Next there's a tile that attempts to break down my "cash flow" by month. It doesn't seem to have noticed the Paypal transfers on which I was largely subsisting for the three months it was able to pull from my bank account, even though they show up fine in Transactions, so it's deeply confused about whether my cash flow is Healthy or Unhealthy. For now, with my acquisition of a second paycheck for August, it seems to have settled on Healthy. I might turn that tile off though. It doesn't really... offer much, I guess?
* I have turned off the tile that shows me my free credit score. That's a problem for a much later me. Right now I have more urgent problems, like catching up on my deferred car insurance and my deferred cell phone bill and my deferred healthcare deductions.
* You also can't turn off the tile for the Mint "Life Blog" or the one asking you to rate the app, but at least they sit at the bottom of the app as you scroll down.
* The desktop version also has an entire segment not found in the app, for "Goals", where you can supposedly put in your outstanding debts and figure out payment schedules for them. It sounds really good in principle, but I found that section of the site unworkably glitchy, on both laptop and iPad; I couldn't even get past the screen where you try to first enter one of your debts, as it required me to choose answers from two dropdowns neither of which would actually do anything. I was able to get an estimate from the "saving for a rainy day" goal, anyway, by putting in the amount of a debt and telling it I'd like to save up that much money in a year, but that's nothing I couldn't have done with a calculator and a bit of mental effort.
* Jumping back up to the top of the app, one other thing that does intermittently drive me bananas about the app is, when you put in a bill you get a dropdown where you select how often it should recur, but then it... doesn't recur. You have to manually put in the next occurrence. It's still a handy list of upcoming bills, but I actually had to resort to my phone calendar (which properly handles recurring events) to get a good visual on future months' bills.
* And because there is nowhere to put in your projected income and get a nice projection of "On X date you will have $XX in your bank account", or even better a daily graph of your expected cash flow so that you can see "yeah don't put that $300 in savings you'll need it for rent in two weeks", I've been reduced to, as mentioned above, manual daily projections through the end of the year using my phone calculator, phone calendar, Google Docs, and eventually my damn iPad drawing app (came with a Bluetooth stylus I never got working) because I couldn't find any physical graph paper.
* So. Um. Summary. I guess it's a good app? It's very sleek, it has nice charts and graphs and a good interface. But it thinks you can do a lot more with it than you can actually do. Its main uses for me are probably going to boil down to "stop forgetting bills" (the rolling list format works a lot better for my brain than the phone calendar format, even if I do have to re-enter data every time I mark a bill paid) and "finally figure out how much I spend on food really".
