Programming My Life

After writing about Mint, I decided to give it a second chance to impress me.  While I maintain that software should be intuitive (e.g. I should be able to change categories of purchases easily, anywhere), I gave in and used the method Mint seems to be forcing me toward;  I used the ‘transactions’ tab to go through my purchases from the last six months to re-categorize any mistakes.

Now that my purchases are categorized appropriately for my budget, I would like to analyze my spending for those six months.  When it comes to my spending habits, I can compare my purchases this month to last month by category. This is mildly interesting, but month-to-month it is easy to have large (or unusually small) expenditures in a given category throw things off.  I really need to look at my average spending over a longer time scale to determine whether I am over or underestimating my spending in specific categories.

One way to do this is to look at the ‘This Year’ tab on the Trends page.  However, this only shows categories, not subcategories.   This means I can see how much I spent on food but not how much I spent on restaurants vs. groceries.  This provides very little insight.  While doing this, I saw that my spending in the automobile category seemed a bit high.  I wanted to click through to see what I had spent so much on for my car, but I am unable to.  Unacceptable.

The only way I was able to look into my spending in subcategories was to go through each month and perform the arithmetic myself to average my spending. Worse than not being able to do this fundamental budgeting task is the fact that I can’t seem to determine what statistics I should look at to see where I can improve my budget.  I’ve tried clicking around the Trends page and seeing if any of the provided statistics give me any insight into my finances, but none of them do.

I’ve noticed a couple of other minor problems since my last Mint article like the inability to spread a lump sum payment over several months; my gym membership is done by semester, though I’d like to divide it up monthly.  Also, it would be great if Mint would ‘learn’ what categories a purchase should be in if I change it for several months in a row;  my ATM withdraws have Penn State in the name of the ATM and thus go into the ‘tuition’ category.  If these minor problems were all that existed, I would be writing a glowing review of how excellent Mint software is with a small addendum on features I’d like to see in the future.  But here we are.

I would like to address why we are here.  It was not my intention to write two articles disparaging Mint (or any other software).  In fact, when I began using Mint, my initial notes were quite positive.  I couldn’t wait to write a review of how great this software was and how it helped me fine tune my budget with little to no effort on my part.  That simply isn’t the case, though.  I will likely still use Mint to keep track of my spending, but I can’t see recommending it to anyone with such a lackluster interface.  When it comes to budgeting, there is too much work for the user to do to come up with meaningful statistics to consider Mint a tool for quick, easy budgeting.