Do you wish to use the Mint Money Manager? Managing your finances can be as hard as making money. Apart from putting other considerations in place, it can involve consulting a financial expert for professional budget advice, or using digital tools to track your level of spending. One of the perfect digital tools to use is the Mint Money Manager App.
What is Mint Money Manager?
The mint money manager is a free online budget tracking app that gives you access to see details of your working budget. The summary of how it works is; you have to customize the tool to produce records of your general spending.
To make this work, you need to provide access to your credit card, bank information, loan accounts, and investment before mint can harmonize the data and showcase all your balances in a single file, so you can easily monitor all your income and expenditures.
This post explains what you need to know about Mint, how to create an account, and how to use it.
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5 Things to Know About Mint Money Manager
Money management is an important step towards achieving an amazing final goal. This is the reason it is also important to monitor your money so that you’ll know where you need to cut down on spending.
If you are itching to know where your money has been going, you need the motivation to start saving, or you want to see your total investment and net worth in one place, Mint can be the perfect platform for you, even at no cost.
Here are the 5 features you need to know about Mint:
1). Bill Payment Tracker
This is an amazing feature that helps out see upcoming bills and total balances, all in one place. Immediately after you connect your accounts, you will see all your intending bills, past payments, and your monthly overheads. The tracker will also show you the total amount of available cash and credit that you have.
When you log in, click on “Bills” and click on another “bill” to start. Thereafter, you can search for any financial organization or select from a popular one in your neighborhood if you have not already connected your accounts. Perhaps you wish to add an offline bill or a property payment, you are free.
Immediately after you select your chosen financial institution, you will be required to register on its website and link your accounts. If you wish to include an offline creditor, you can enter a name for the creditor, the category of the bill (educational, house rent, etc), the amount, its due date, as well as the method of payment.
2). Budgeting
Immediately after you connect your bank accounts to your Mint profile, the App or website will automatically assess your level of spending and suggest ways to adjust your budget. Remember, you can create and adjust your budget any time you wish.
Expenditures can be grouped into bills, entertainment, education, personal care, food, kids, drinks, shopping, and pets. You can also these groups to create a personal budget.
To start, go to your dashboard and click on the “Budget” tab to create a budget. Thereafter, select the category you wish to budget for, and include the amount. Once you do this, Mint will begin to calculate the amount of money you need to keep every month so that you can your budget expenses. Finally, click “save” to include that item in your budget.
This tab does an amazing job in tacking your previous level of spending so you can set achievable goals for the future. This is the reason it is ideal to ensure all your transactions are grouped correctly.
3). Free Credit Score
Mint can give you a free credit score depending on your credit report.
To get started, you can click “Get Your Free Credit Score” immediately after you visit the “Credit Score” tab on the website’s Homepage. Kindly note that you will be required to complete a two-step verification process in order to confirm your identity. Immediately after it is confirmed, you will have access to view your credit score with other conditions that may affect your score. These unpleasant conditions can be in the form of; the age of credit, one-time payments, credit usage, derogatory marks, total accounts, as well as credit inquiries.
This tab also gives you access to see suggestions on how to improve your credit score.
4). Alerts
Connecting all your accounts on Mint will help you get all-in-one alerts. If you are using the App, ensure you activate its notification settings to come through your mobile phone. But if you are accessing it through the website, that is; mint.com, you can sign up for desktop and email notifications.
To get customized alerts, click “Settings” and then “Notifications.” While on the Notifications page, activate the weekly and monthly email alerts that contain the summary of your balances, stocks, and budgets, as well as alerts for bill reminders.
In addition, you will receive alerts when your balances are low when charges are deducted, as well as when you are spending more than your budget.
5). Investments
Another amazing feature that Mint has is the technology to trace your investments. With this, you are advised to connect your brokerage accounts to view all your investments domiciled on one spot, alongside your assets.
Mint also has a high-powered technology to help you spot hidden charges from investment advisors and brokerages.
To get started, kindly visit the “Investment” tab after you log in to Mint. While on the tab, click on “Add Account” to start connecting your investment accounts to your Mint profile. When this is done, you will have access to see all your investments in one place including brokerage accounts, mutual funds, and IRAs.
Perhaps you are not able to manage your investments through Mint, you will be able to track them to compare your investment with market performance.
How Mint Compares to Other Budgeting Apps
If you wish to explore other Apps with more features, YNAB is a good example; though it is not free, unlike the Mint.
With YNAB, you can easily budget for future months and as well have some tips on how to spend your money smarter. The organization offers free 20-minute educational workshops daily. It is unfortunate to say that YNAB is a premium App, meaning that you will have to pay before use. This means you’ll rather stay with Mint if you need a free budgeting App.
Also, if you need an App that suits the couple’s plans, then Zeta can do the job. It features tools that can help couples to manage and split budgets. You can see overall earnings and expenditures, assess previous transactions, and notify you when bills are due.
The Zeta App is technically designed to allow couples to choose whether they want to individualize their expenses or make them shared. But if you are comfortable with the individual budgeting App, then Mint is a perfect choice.
Again, the Mint is free to use at no monetary cost at all. You don’t need to upgrade intermittently or pay for any plan. The App is best suitable for people who are new to budgeting or those in need of an easy way to create a financial budget.
Concluding Thoughts
Financial planning and budgeting are a smart ways of saving money. No doubt, people use different traditional methods in keeping track of their income and expenditures, it is rather wise to involve technology. In this post, we have seen the usefulness of the Mint Money Manager, as being a free resource, and can provide accurate data on how you should budget your personal finance with its organized features.
