Tag: household budgeting

Intuit, the company behind Quicken, has just purchased Mint.com for $170 million – what an exit for them! I’ve been a user of Mint.com for a while now after having a complete breakdown about finances with my husband. I was lamenting the fact that I have no time to input our information on Quicken, categorize it and then analyze it. But, as a mom in charge of the household, I desperately NEED to do all of those things and MORE!

Enter Mint.com. Now, it’s not the magic bullet that I was hoping it would be, but then again my expectations were a little high. No software program can magically earn money for me while organizing it and analyzing it, too…

I do have to say, though, that it has made my life a lot simpler. Now, I can go on at will and view my financial information without being bogged down with all these “updates” that I have to input before getting good information out.

One of the coolest features of Mint is its ability to automatically synch up with your checking, savings, and credit card accounts in real time, which saves all the manual data entry of other budgeting programs. You know the old saying: “garbage in, garbage out”. Mint definitely cuts down on that. To be honest, I do have to re-categorize things and in general double check what it does, but it’s super easy and doesn’t take much time.

For instance, you can track certain transactions specifically – like if you think that you’ve already paid something yet you get another bill, then simply look up the transaction. Big deal if you’re plagued with “mommy brain.” Or, if you want to know exactly how much you spend on say, groceries, then that’s there, too. Or if you want to compare your grocery spending for any give time frame to a budget you set up for groceries, then that’s there, too.

Of course, this isn’t new to accounting software, but Mint updates your records automatically, so there is no downloading, importing or inputting. That’s valuable time to get back. And, they’ve just added a whole new planning section that looks really promising (this part is new to me, so I haven’t checked it out yet)!

I’d say it’s a very good program for moms who want and need to stay on top of the finances but have dwindling time to do so. Like I said, it’s not the end all be all, but it is good. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?