The following is a guest post written by my sister Kristine. She has been using Mint.com to manage her family’s finances and she likes it so much that she wanted to share her experience with my readers. While I haven’t used Mint.com myself, I have heard many good things from trusted sources including Clark Howard (LOVE him!) and The New York Times.

I discovered Mint.com a few weeks ago after my friend had recommended I check them out. My husband and I are both students and have been married for about a year. I have always wanted to get into budgeting so that we could start better planning for our future, but when I sat down to think about what I was spending my money on, I often was too overwhelmed by trying to categorize and nit pick everything myself and would just give up. I still paid close attention to what our money was being spent on, but there are always little things that fall through the cracks that are not calculated into “the big picture”.

After visiting the site, I was skeptical about entering my online banking information onto the site. I was assured that this site was legit as it has been recommended by countless money management specialists. I reviewed the different features and decided to give it a whirl.

As a first time budgeter, this is a dream come true! About three months of information is pulled from your online bank accounts. You can pull in your savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, loans, properties, investments, etc.

I started by adding our checking account which is also tied to our debit card. It pulls in all of your transactions and manually categorizes them. I did have to go through and manually change a few of the transactions because it wasn’t always right on guessing.
This only took me a few minutes to go through a few months worth of transactions because they can generally do a good job at guessing which category it will go in. I also went through and categorized all of my checks so they weren’t just categorized as “checks written”.

They start you with a general budget, but I went through and revised a majority of what they had laid out. The good thing about setting a budget here is that I had three months of information to base my budget on; I wasn’t just blindly creating my budget and trying to guess how much I spend on things like groceries that tend to fluctuate. What I love most about mint.com is that it gives a realistic perspective of where you are really spending your money. And it doesn’t just show you the set expenses that you have each month like mortgage/rent, utilities, car payments, etc. like most budgets would. It shows you the breakdown of where almost every single dollar actually goes. I could see areas that I was spending too much money and could set a goal to spend less in that area.

Another great benefit is that you can track your money as the month goes along. If you see that in the beginning of the month, you have already spent half of your budget and still have a few weeks, you can know to slow down your spending in that area. If you go over in a certain area, it also turns that category a different color and tells you how much you are over budget.

After I set my budget, I clicked on the Trends icon. This brought up a pie chart of where I could actually see where I was spending my money. This also puts into perspective how much money you are spending in one area compared to another area and also where you can definitely cut out what you don’t need.

The trends page also gives a breakdown of which Merchants you most frequently visit. This will also allow you to see that you could probably cut out a few of these unnecessary purchases.

The whole process is definitely an eye opener. As I mentioned before, there are so many little purchases that you just don’t really think twice about. After I saw where all of my money was going, and how we were wasting money on a few silly things (mostly eating out), I now think twice about EVERY purchase. By seeing where we can cut out unnecessary purchases, this is going to allow us to save more money each month.

I haven’t tried out the loan section, but from what I have seen online, it looks like it is a great tool as well. It tracks exactly how much more you owe. You can also create budgets and alerts to help you meet your new spending goals and reduce your debt at a faster rate.

I am a relatively new user, but I can already see the benefits of just the basic use. By going in every day or every few days, I can make sure that everything is sorting properly and also track my progress. The best part of it all is that it is completely FREE! You don’t have to pay for a subscription or for the software, it is available anywhere. You can also set up notifications on your cell phone or to your email. They also make recommendations of how you can save more money. It is definitely worth trying out! You will not be disappointed!

I am interested to know if any of my readers have used Mint.com? If so what was your experience? Let me know in the comments!