just adding another voice to the choir saying I use my travel rewards Amex for every purchase I possibly can, and I use Mint to help me keep track :) I pay mine off every payday.
One thing that helps me is thinking like this: If you can keep track of the decreasing balance in your checking account and avoid overdrafting (which it sounds like you can), why not keep track of the
increasing balance on your cc account? If you know you can only afford to spend X amount per month or per pay period on non-bill expenses (which is what I use my cc for, rent etc. comes out of the checking account), then just watch your balance and you can say, "oops, I'm getting close to $500, better slow down because I don't want to 'overdraft'" or whatever :)
It seems like the consensus on Mint vs YNAB is that it just comes down to personal preference. I've been using Mint since 2008 and while there are some things I wish would change about it, overall it suits my needs very well. Others feel that YNAB is better for budgeting, but I like Mint's budgeting capabilities as well.
As for the varying levels of fraud protection, I did just find out today that someone was using my Amex card fraudulently over the weekend (I'm guessing due to the Target thing since I used it there once). Had a good customer service experience, I called Amex and they fixed it in <15 minutes and are expediting me a new card. But I've heard of banks being really helpful with this too, I think maybe it's just more of a crapshoot. I know I personally did feel relieved when I realized this was the only card I'd used at Target in that time frame because I knew if anything happened it'd be super easy to fix.
I'm looking at Mint's budgeting feature right now and it could work. I also saw in another thread about budgeting software something called YNAB and it looks pretty cool.
What's killing me right now with Mint is our transactions at Walmart & Sam's Club. Hard to look at that and tell from past transactions what is food, or clothes, or even diapers. How do you break down transactions that are a combination of groceries and other budgeted items? I'm sorry if this is a silly question....
Yep, I have this problem too :( There is a "split transaction" feature on Mint that lets you separate one transaction into multiples and categorize them accordingly. The only problem I have with this is that it requires me to do shit by hand, and probably within a few days before I throw away the receipt, and I'm terrible about that (which is why I don't think I would like YNAB as much, I think you have to do stuff manually?) I don't care about separating it out too much right now so I don't really worry about it, but I have done this in the past and it does work.
As I 'm writing this out it's dawning on me that I've had NO IDEA where my money goes.
This is an awesome realization!!! Welcome to the forum :)