Ok DCUM personal finance geniuses, help me figure this out....

[Anonymous]

When you say Mint shows you ahead by $1300 each month - is that from the budgeting numbers or the income vs spending numbers (which shows up on the left side of the main page in a bar graph of the last 6 months). If it's the budgeting numbers then you have another $1300 per month that hasn't been accounted for in your budget (it would fall into the "everything else" category. If it's literally from the income vs. spending numbers then there is something that Mint isn't tracking correctly. And of course this is impossible for us to tell because we can't see your Mint account. Do yourself a favor and hire a financial planner on a fee basis to look over your numbers and tell you what is going on and how much of a mortgage you actually can afford.

[Anonymous]

I think it’s your credit card. If your payment is showing as transfer, then your actual charges (each individual one) need to show up as payments.

[Anonymous]

My income is half of yours, my mortgage is $3000 and I never have to resort to carrying credit card debt. Your problem isn’t mint.

[Anonymous]

I don't use Mint but do use Quicken. Three things that I watch for are:

1. Double counting credit card payments (bc, as other PPs have said, if the individual charges are listed then you shouldn't also count the payoffs).

2. Are you accounting for insurance payments and insurance reimbursements? In order for all Insurance to be reconciled in Quicken, you need to have the original monthly payment to Health Insurance Company, All Contributions to HSAs, Original Payment to Doctor/Hospital and Any Reimbursement (either from HSA or from Insurance Company) each listed. Only then will you have an accurate net cost of Health Insurance (or any other insurance product for that matter).

3. Is every Cash Withdrawal also separately listed?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Whatever the issue is with Mint, the proof is in the pudding. You spend more than you make. When you figure out why Mint isn't tracking correctly, the correction will reflect why you're in the red - it doesn't change the fact that you are in the red.

Op again. Yeah, right. So we need to pay off the credit card debt and reduce spending to free up $1600. But I'm still totally baffled about Mint! It is accurate each month in terms of red or black - and we swing wildly from one to the other due to the unpredictability of my DH's income. Makes budgeting and cash flow hard. Maybe it's something off with the trends feature. I just don't get it. And their customer service is completely useless. Maybe we should switch to another system.

If you decide to switch, I really like YNAB. Takes a couple of months to get used to, but have been using it for 9 months now and it’s been great. I think it would help you with the uneven income too.

No advice for your Mint problems but another fan of YNAB. Mint is simply a tracking service after you've already spent your money, where as YNAB does a better job of relaying real time spending habits and working towards future financial goals. In the first 3 months of using YNAB, we were able to pay off 8k in CC debt and 7k in car loans (which something we'd been trying to do for over a year with Mint, with little success).

[Anonymous]

How are you determining that you have an extra $1300 a month. What exact feature in Mint are you using? You should be looking at your checking account and savings account balance in my opinion as everything probably flows through there.

If you are looking at something else, like "net worth" that isn't the right thing to look at. Depending on what you are looking at, Mint might be counting retirement contributions or something as "savings" when it really doesn't increase your cash on hand each month.

[Anonymous]

I think the budgeting feature on Mint is terrible because it often incorrectly classified expenses. What you can do, and what is the only thing that really matters here, is go into the desktop version of Mint and look at the trends section and look at the trends for your bank account. You can figure out your monthly deficit/surplus by taking an average for the period you are measuring.

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand how you have such s high credit card balance if as you say originally you rack up charges one month and then pay it off the next.

Is the $1300 average over the entire year, but the $18,000 credit card debt is for a month when your DH’s income was low?

[Anonymous]

Is Mint accounting for the _interest_ on the credit card debt? That would explain the discrepany right there.

Can you take out a HELOC? Much lower interest rate.

Also, you're the people interest-only mortgages were actually designed for. Pay just interests in teh months DH's income is low,t hen pay big money in the months when his income is high.

[Anonymous]

This is the answer:

It's your mortgage principal. That doesn't get tracked as an expense but a transfer as it pays down your debt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My income is half of yours, my mortgage is $3000 and I never have to resort to carrying credit card debt. Your problem isn’t mint.

+1

[Anonymous]

Another theory is that your issue is cash flow (vs budget)... if you are spending money BEFORE you make it your balance will always be behind. You need to budget based on the cash you have on the first day of the month. This solves the issue.

[Anonymous]

OP - did you ever figure this out?

[Anonymous]

I was just about to start to learn to use Mint but this thread has made me change my mind!

[Anonymous]

So I noticed two things with mint

1) It often categorizes wire transfers between accounts as income even when it’s not. That often ends up double counting.

2) It’s generally awful at getting the income / expense right.