For many years I paid for Quicken to track my expenses. It's about $50 to purchase, and while I loved the way it worked, I got tired of having to upgrade it every year or two to keep the features. They would force you to upgrade or they would stop downloading transactions. Even though I was happy with what it offered before the upgrade, part of what I liked about Quicken was keeping the transactions up to date.
I decided that in retirement, and re-evaluating the way we spent our money, it was an expense I could eliminate.
I decided to try Intuit's Mint. It's totally free, and if you just enter your banking information into their secure site, the program downloads and syncs transactions for you every day. It's always current, practically to the minute. It even works with your investments, AND allows you to enter loans as well as assets.
In trying to be prepared for filing my taxes the first quarter of 2019, I decided to scroll through all of my transactions for 2018 and make sure they were categorized correctly. They have plenty of standard categories to choose from, but you can also create your own. Under income, for example, I can designate what comes from Social Security, or my Etsy shop.
Once you set the category for an expense, like electricity, it will generally continue to put that payee in the same category, but one thing that I realized I needed to change was payments to credit cards. For example, we have a Wal-Mart card that we use primarily for fuel because we get a discount by using it. We pay it off every month. In my register, however, it was showing Wal-Mart payments as "shopping." I was able to go in and change that to "Transfer: Credit Card Payment." If I wanted to, I could create another category that read, "Transfer: Credit Card Payment to Wal-Mart."
While you can set budgets in Mint, I have also found that it helps to have a spreadsheet to see what expenses I have coming up. For instance, I will enter my income and dates it should be deposited, and list all of the expenses for the month. I usually have about three months entered at any time, so that I can see that on those rare times that I have extra money, I still can't spend it because I have an expense coming up later. While it would be great to look at that balance and think I have extra to spend, usually that is not the case.
Mint will allow you to go in and add future transactions, and then when they come in, they will match up, but I have found that it is a bit time consuming. I like using the spreadsheet. While it may seem like double work, it helps me stay on track. I just have columns for:
Date
Payee
Deduction
Deposit
Balance
Bank Balance
And then I do a formula to keep a running balance at all times. I just have to be careful to include the deductions as a negative number! One time I thought I had loads of money in the account, only to discover that I'd entered them as a positive.
When checking in with Mint, I will enter the balance the bank shows, and then use another column to add my balance plus any outstanding transactions to make sure we agree.
These may seem like extra steps, and perhaps you have a better way of doing it, but it really helps me have a good snapshot of where my money is going.
By the way ... while going through personal files and documents, this is a great time to record information that would be helpful to you in the event of an evacuation, or for your family in the event of your absence. My ebook, All They'll Need to Know, is a quick download, and available on my Etsy shop for $9.95. You can get started today and enter the information from your computer.
