If you have not heard of Mint, by Intuit, it is a powerful app that lets you see your complete financial picture all in one place. It is the perfect app for tracking how you stack up against your budget each month and much more. If you’ve never built a budget for yourself before you’re in luck. Right now I am giving away my Budgeting Made Easy checklist to new subscribers. Just click here to sign up.
What Does The Mint App Include?
Mint is a budgeting tool, net worth tracker, cash flow tracker, and credit score tracker all bundled up into one amazing app. Seriously, this thing is powerful. It will also alert you when you have upcoming bills so that you’ll never miss a payment!
Budgeting
One of Mint’s many functionalities is budgeting. When you download the app you should take the time to set up your budget. This will involve setting amounts that you either expect to spend, or do not want to spend more than in many different categories. Best practice would be to go back through your past months of expenses in order to get a realistic picture of what ballpark a certain group of expenses might be in.
Once you have set up your budget with Mint then you no longer have to touch it again unless you decide to make changes in a category. For example if you moved and ended up having a different rent you would likely want to change your budgeted rent to the new rent amount that you will be paying.
Tracking
Once you’ve built your budget Mint allows you to track your spending, broken down into tons of different potential categories. Not only will you be able to see how much you spent relative to each category, you will also see your total monthly budget and how well your spending is aligned with that total monthly number.
Mint is not psychic, however, so in order to facilitate this tracking you will have to link some accounts to the app.
Linking Accounts
You can link everything to Mint. Really, everything. Gone are the days of having to check all of your accounts one at a time to figure out where you stand. I check one app every day to make sure everything is in good shape with my finances and that app is Mint.
I have three checking accounts, a savings account, a brokerage account, three credit cards, my Roth IRA, my 401(k), a Forex account, and even my Georgia Power account linked to Mint. This not only allows me to monitor the values of those accounts all in one place, but also allows me to keep track of when bills are due.
Net Worth
By linking all of my accounts to Mint I also get the benefit of seeing my full financial picture, Including my net worth. Mint combines your cash accounts, credit accounts, and investment accounts all in one place so that every day you can see exactly where you stand. Even if you have a negative net worth or just feel like you do not have many accounts to track, it is always good to keep close track of your finances.
Credit Score
Mint gives you your credit score too, for free. Not only that, but they also update it once every 30 days to keep you current. This is just another way that Mint keeps your financial house in order.
The score report will give you your credit score as well as suggestions for improvement, and a list of factors that may have caused your score to be less than perfect. Bad credit can really cost you so knowing how to go about fixing it is huge.
The Swiss Army Knife of Finance Apps
Mint really is great. I assure you that if you take the time to build a budget and link your accounts to Mint you will have made a huge step towards being in complete control of your finances. The app offers so much utility and allows me to check one app instead of ten. Hopefully it can do the same for you.
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