Budgeting is usually boring.  There’s no denying that.  Thankfully though we live in a day and age when there’s a ton of nifty apps and technology to make it a little bit less daunting.

All the apps and tech I touch on are not paid endorsements – they are all just my personal experiences and opinions.

This post is going to touch on Mint.  Unfortunately Mint Bills doesn’t support my bank so I’m just covering the budgeting app for now.

Mint is through Intuit so I totally trust their security.  Intuit is the company which handles the very popular accounting software Quickbooks which I have used for business accounting for years.  The best thing about Mint? It’s totally free! I looooove budgeting software that is free!

Through Mint you link your bank accounts, credit card accounts, savings, debts, assets; all that jazz.  I’ve found a lot of fancy budgeting and saving apps that link your bank accounts don’t come available for Canadian banks but fret not my fellow Canadians – Mint does!

Once you link your accounts, Mint will classify your transactions for you.  You can change these to anything you like and Mint in future put them there.  By default though, it does a pretty good job of classifying them.

From there you will want to set up your monthly budget.  If there are any categories you need – add them!  If there are some you know you’ll never use – delete them!  You can totally customize the budget.  Mint is great that every single month you can customize the budget to match the expenses for that month.  And this is one of the biggest problems when budgeting – ignoring the infrequent or emergency expenses.  Every month there is usually at least one irregular or unexpected expense that I will blame financial times on that are never included in my lack-luster financial planning.  “The dog got fixed this month” “My plate stickers had to be renewed” “It was the true-up month for my budget billing plan for hydro where they bill me the difference”.  These ones aren’t even surprises but I never include them in my basic monthly budget so they may as well have been.  Therefore with mint my biggest revelation was that it’s totally ok and even BENEFICIAL (scratch that it’s NECESSARY!) to completely redo your budget every month to reflect these expenses.  If it’s a pop-up expense Mint will classify it as soon as I spend the money and the next time I log in I’ll see I need to move money around to accommodate it.

Mint also sends you alerts to let you know when you’re reaching or over your budget for categories – which is a good reason to get the app.  You get on the go alerts!  There is also a ton of different ways to analyze your past spending through the trends reporting.

All in all Mint is a simple, easy to use and low maintenance platform for budgeting.  It’s accessible either from your computer or your smart phone so you can easily access your account.  I love it, but it’s important to log in frequently.  Every couple of days at most just to quickly classify your transactions and be on your way 🙂