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comment by insomniasexx
insomniasexx  ·  3303 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, how do you budget ?

I use Mint to stay aware of what I spend money on. I've always been obsessively frugal when buying stuff and Making puchasing decisions so I've yet to use it to control or limit my spending. It is nice for taxes at the end of the year as I tag things that I know can be written off, export as a csv, and give it to my accountant. He's much more liberal about writing things off.

I like how automatic it is and it captures all my accounts (PayPal, checking, savings, two CCs, and my investments).

It's also pretty good at categorizing automatically which means less work for you.

Random user and I have a Google sheet to make sure that rent and the bills get paid and so we can be more aware of our electricity (something we thought was rather high the first two months of living here). That's less about budgeting and more about keeping track and making sure one of us pays stuff.





kleinbl00  ·  3303 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've heard great things about Mint. Unfortunately we're currently straddling two S-Corps and an LLC, which complicates things (3 Paypal, 6 checking, 6 saving, 2 CC, a mortgage, 2 brokerage accounts and a partridge in a pear tree). Fortunately our accountant is big into Quickbooks so we just throw the file at her.

insomniasexx  ·  3303 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah I think it's definitely better for one person / a few accounts. Even having my brokerage in there screws things up when I'm looking at it for me. I'd like to know how much I've made and spent this month (you know, from work and stuff) but on a good month I may have dividends (that immediately get reinvested) screw that number up. Say I make 2000 and spend 1000. My dividends are then recorded as +500 and then -500. So it'll actually say I made 2500 and spent 1500. The difference is the same, but when the numbers are larger is confusing as all hell.

I think I might throw that one into a separate mint account just for the emails telling me my ups and downs. There is probably a setting to hide it from my daily spending stuff but I haven't become annoyed enough yet.

zonk  ·  3301 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oooh, the deductable tag is a really great idea. I will totally steal that for my YNAB habbits. It supports some coloring/flags you can set. I'm gonna go ahead later and define one for deductable. So smart! Thanks.

(I should also define one for money I expect to get back, actually. And another shade of this color for "debts collected". This way I can also see if anyone hasn't paid their debts yet.)