Mint - Am I asking too much?

[DawgMan]

A little over a year ago I moved from a very old archaic version of Quicken (self input), which I used for over 25 years, and started using Mint. I realize it's free and sometimes you get what you pay for, but perhaps some of you Mint experts can tell me if there are any solutions to the following...

- Budget: When I look at YTD Budget items I created and roll the courser over the category, it says "you spent X$ and your budget is Y$", however, when I click the category, it shows all my transactions and a different YTD total?

- Budget: Despite setting up specific categories, there is an Everything Else catch all category below all my set up budgets (not created by me) which are holding items/categories I have budgeted for? Additionally, Transfers/Credit Card payments show up there in weird amounts despite the fact they effectively zero out?

- Budget/Trends: Is there any way to get get Budgets/Trends to show categories set up for any investments? Eg: I have set up a Dividends & Capital Gains category to track them in my brokerage account and it would be nice to easily see what is being generated YTD.

- Budget: Any easy way to print off a clean YTD Budget/Actual Expense Report?

- Investments: Symbol breakdown is nice, but when I click Asset Type it says Unknown?

- Any other cool stuff I should try?

I am not trying to get super anal at this point of my life and like the general auto-tracking of my expenses and I know there are ways to dump various transactions into excel, but I was hoping there might be some generic reporting I could spit out more easily. Again, I get it's free so perhaps I need to graduate to something that costs a dollar, but before I do, I wanted to make sure I am not missing some things that are there and solve my issues.

 

[WhenIsItTime]

I've used Mint for the past year primarily as an expense tracking tool. I have similar frustrations with budgeting and more so with reporting. Heck, I'm still trying to decide if I am OK with it not requiring double entry accounting.

 

[swaneesr]

I have been using Mint for the past three or four years. Seems most folks around here are using Quicken or YNAB.

I am using the budget setting more to catch categorization errors and charge increases. It does a decent job displaying the overall buckets. My data set gives me a great picture of spending since late 2016.

I have not seen a method to export data or run reports.

Maybe I should be looking at YNAB. I did download the app the other day.

 

[Freedom56]

I have been using MS Money since 1989 to track everything financial. Microsoft discontinued the product in 2011 and released a Sunset Edition (never expires) and I have been using that since. It does the job and I have 31 years of data that would be difficult to migrate to another system. I wouldn't recommend using any online provider of financial software where you aggregate all your account information. You are just risking handing over the keys to your kingdom to a hacker.

 

[tmm99]

I don't use the budget part of Mint at all although I initially set it all up. It just doesn't do much. I use Mint exclusively for other things like keeping track of my spending, monitoring the monthly spending trend, net worth trend, etc. They mix up CAD and USD and some Canadian banks won't give Mint access, but it is still a good tool for the money (=$0.00).

 

[swaneesr]

I have been using MS Money since 1989 to track everything financial. Microsoft discontinued the product in 2011 and released a Sunset Edition (never expires) and I have been using that since. It does the job and I have 31 years of data that would be difficult to migrate to another system. I wouldn't recommend using any online provider of financial software where you aggregate all your account information. You are just risking handing over the keys to your kingdom to a hacker.

I agree using an online provider does add an attack vector to accounts. I would think locally installed software would lessen the risk. One thing though, DW and myself do monitor our accounts daily. We also have online alerts for purchase levels. I do understand the risk however.

Pretty amazing you have been able to keep MS Money running. Perhaps a VMware image or something. Eventually it will not run on a current Microsoft OS right?

One thing though. Eventually data becomes obsolete. Data older than 5-7 years is interesting but not as important. One reason we are tracking spending is to get a handle on spending level during retirement.

SwaneeSR

 

[swaneesr]

I don't use the budget part of Mint at all although I initially set it all up. It just doesn't do much. I use Mint exclusively for other things like keeping track of my spending, monitoring the monthly spending trend, net worth trend, etc. They mix up CAD and USD and some Canadian banks won't give Mint access, but it is still a good tool for the money (=$0.00).

I agree. Great for tracking spending. Interesting to compare the spending buckets and year to year spend on the areas.

Budget setting not very valuable to us. Not really a Mint software problem. We are just using the parts of Mint that we are interested is using.

Almost using for net worth. I manually added our 401k/403b tax advantaged accounts as manual entry property. Mint was buggy in the IOS version I am using Dailey. Had to log on with PC browser to update. I gave up and deleted back out.