Sophie Explains

When I first started recording my earnings and expenses monthly, it was a tedious process: I was logging into each individual bank and credit card account to view transactions, copying them over to my personal budgeting spreadsheet, and finally re-ordering everything chronologically. At the time, I was a full-time student and did not yet have many expenses, but when I started working and living on my own, the long process made budgeting unbearable. Then I found Mint!

Mint.com is a secure and free way to combine all of your account transactions to help you budget efficiently each month.

As this is a personal blog, I wanted to share with you my own reasons for using Mint.com. This post is extremely relevant because next week I will help you create and fill out your very own budgeting spreadsheet, and using Mint.com is a necessary time-saving resource for that process.

Sophie’s Top 5 Reasons for Using Mint.com

1. Free: Who wants to spend money on budgeting tools when you could spend it on fun vacations and pampering pets?
2. Secure: Mint is owned by Intuit, the same company that runs both TurboTax, a popular tax preparation software, and QuickBooks, a small-business accounting program. Mint uses multi-factor authentication upon login and SSL encryption to ensure that all data stays safe.
3. Convenient: In addition to organizing your daily transactions, Mint provides an updated credit score each month with a breakdown explanation of the factors that affect your score, as well as clear instructions on how to improve your score. (We will dive into the importance of credit scores in a later post!)
4. Accessible: You don’t have to worry about missing and leaving out your cash transactions, just log into the Mint app on your phone anywhere anytime and record your expenses directly.
5. Easy: The first time you use Mint you will have to spend a few minutes linking all the appropriate accounts, but after that it’s ready to go! Mint saves me hours each month when I budget because I don’t have to switch between accounts to log information. I appreciate that Mint can find ways to save my time and work efficiently.

Mint has so much more to offer than I have discussed above, so take some time to explore for yourself and see what a wonderful resource it is. Other sites, free and paid, are similar to Mint, and I suggest you check those out as well and let me know if you find something better. In the end, I encourage you to find a resource that helps you save time each month so that budgeting is a fun experience, not a tedious chore!

Next week, to thank you for being so supportive, I have a special two-part series ready to get you started on creating your own budgeting spreadsheet! Please follow Sophie Explains on Facebook for the latest updates.

Note to Readers: No, this is not a paid promotional post, although if Mint would like to change that I would be happy to accept. (Just kidding!)