Author Topic: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?  (Read 1424 times)

newbie

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Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« on: September 01, 2022, 01:58:18 PM »
I have been using Mint to try track our expenses for about 6 months, but have found it to be frustrating at times - for example, it repeatedly puts certain bills into wrong categories even though I have made the edit every month (our automatic car payment into the utilities category vs vehicles).  Additionally, the compare function in the investments section has never worked for me - I should be able to see how my investments look as compared to what the NDAQ looks like over long and short periods of time.  I am considering trying Personal Capital, but it is a lot of work to enter all the info.  Wondering if just the old fashioned paper and pencil is really what I need to be doing. 
Any advice?

mspym

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #1 on: September 01, 2022, 02:19:28 PM »
Spiral notebook/excel spreadsheet combo should get you most of the way there. I went through the learning curve of gnucash 4 years ago but happily used a spreadsheet for years before that.

Adventine

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #2 on: September 01, 2022, 02:35:48 PM »
You could try a free expense manager app (plenty of options) for your phone. Less cumbersome than pen and paper. Some apps will then let you export the data to a spreadsheet.

yachi

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #3 on: September 01, 2022, 10:40:05 PM »
I'm not sure how you purchase the majority of your things, but I've gotten very good data from discover and American Express on where most of my expenses go.  We charge 100% of our groceries to a credit card to get cashback points, so I can just look at the last 12 months of grocery expenses for budget estimating.  I never bothered separating paper products, cleaning supplies, charcoal, and fire starter from the rest of our groceries because I've always been mostly interested in projecting how much we'd spend in ER.  Periodically (or when I'm shocked) I'll look over the total bill and try to figure out the highest cost items and make sure I'm still getting value out of them.

I tried Mint for awhile, but I always had to retrain it away from considering my 100% credit card payment some sort of debt repayment.  Investments never worked for me, because it couldn't figure out what things were.

The nail in the coffin was reading about more limited account protections from my brokerage when sharing login information with third parties.

davisgang90

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #4 on: September 02, 2022, 04:06:30 AM »
I've tried to use Mint, Personal Capital etc. and always go back to my spreadsheet.

I've got a monthly budget/investment tracker that feeds into several other sheets that map out long term growth, RMD/tax planning and such.

I just like having full control.

index

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #5 on: September 02, 2022, 08:33:42 AM »
I use Tiller. It automatically brings in all your transactions and balances like Mint and PC into Google Sheets or Excel. You can then manipulate the data however you would like. They also have a large community of people who share new tracking spreadsheets and work flows. It costs $79/yr but is well worth the cost to me. 

the_hobbitish

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #6 on: September 02, 2022, 09:20:03 AM »
I use YNAB for tracking expenses and planning spending. It handles things like learning how you categorize transactions really well. I like to set aside money each month for yearly one-time expenses, which shows nicely in the budget tab. Highly recommend.

I use personal capital to track investments only (401k, IRA, VSTAX etc). It has a tab that shows a comparison between your investment growth and NASDQ/SP500.

alcon835

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #7 on: September 08, 2022, 08:09:45 PM »
I use YNAB for tracking expenses and planning spending. It handles things like learning how you categorize transactions really well. I like to set aside money each month for yearly one-time expenses, which shows nicely in the budget tab. Highly recommend.

I use personal capital to track investments only (401k, IRA, VSTAX etc). It has a tab that shows a comparison between your investment growth and NASDQ/SP500.

This is exactly the same for me. I use YNAB for tracking expenses and to plan future spending, I have yet to find another budgeting app that comes close to what it can do and how easily it allows me to create and run a budget. But, it's worthless for investments without a TON of manual intervention, so...

For investment and general Net Worth/Wealth tracking I use Personal Capital. It is a really solid day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year overview of my wealth and progress.

And then anything more granular than the above I do with spreadsheets, but 99% of my tracking use cases are covered between YNAB and Personal Capital. Everything else feels like a half-way solution of one of these two apps.

jim555

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #8 on: September 09, 2022, 05:51:25 AM »
Spreadsheets for me.  Track every penny.

BC_Goldman

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #9 on: September 09, 2022, 06:44:23 AM »
I'm still using Money 2004. Started with a $5 copy of Money 99 I found at a Goodwill around 2001. A new laptop came with 2004 so I've been using that ever since. It's extra work because I haven't tried the online linking stuff so I put in everything manually. It's nice that it lets me split transactions so I can get really detailed if I want for everything. I also use it to track my mortgage and adjust my home balance every month so they net out to 0.

I don't use it to track my investments. I have a custom spreadsheet to track my retirement net worth.

My 401k had a decent thing for tracking net worth and expenses but I stopped using it after a while because it annoyed me that it counted cash as investments but kept credit cards in a different category. Now I just have my FI accounts linked to it so I can get my balance at the end of each month for updating my spreadsheet.

DeniseNJ

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #10 on: September 09, 2022, 07:37:13 AM »
I use Mint.  I'm happy with it. I list credit card payments as transfers and click the button to keep it that way.  It says something like, "always keep it this way, with a box to click. and there are "tags" you could make.

Basically I look every few days to see what the fam is spending and make sure everything is categorized correctly, and check for any suspicious charges, etc.  I really don't so any major data sorting. I just like to see who I paid and when.

But I also don't budget.  I save first, then pay bills, then spend the rest (within reason).

Laura33

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #11 on: September 09, 2022, 01:26:38 PM »
Sounds like you want one program to handle multiple different tasks, where you may be better off with two.  Tracking expenses and evaluating your investments are two very different things, so the same program may not do both of those very well.  And the specific program that will best serve each of those needs will depend on how you like to work.  For me, ease of implementation was the top priority, so for years I used a notebook with something like 4-6 major categories (food, housing, transportation, recreation, misc.?), and simply wrote down everything as I spent it; I paid no attention to things like tracking real-time cashflow (e.g., did I record it when I bought the thing or when I paid the CC bill?) or investment transfers (which were automated).  My DH, OTOH, is an engineer who likes as much detail as possible, so he put everything into Quicken, and tracks all the transfers and shares bought and account values and all that.*  He also did his own spreadsheet with retirement projections.  Figure out your own preferences/how you work best, figure out the specific things you want to be able to do, and then find the programs that mesh best with your workstyle for each of those tasks. 

*Which I, of course, now avoid, because it's WAY more complicated.  Luckily the strict budget is no longer as key as it was back then.

patchyfacialhair

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #12 on: September 09, 2022, 01:57:32 PM »
I built my own excel file from scratch. I like it because I learned more about excel and the math behind core financial concepts while building it.

It started out rudimentary, and has evolved into a multi-tabbed monstrosity. I basically started it when I found MMM so it has taken years for me to get it how I like it. I have:
1) A dashboard showing the things i like to see. (Projected retirement date is my favorite)
2) Inputs tab, the only place where I input the actual raw numbers that feed into the rest of the book.
3) Net worth tracker. It's useless, but I like to see it.
4) Monthly budget
5) Home stuff, like mortgage, and spaces to play with numbers if i were to sell, buy something else, spend on improvement etc.
6) A retirement tab, where I calculate retirement taxes and retirement spending and a few other metrics specifically related to retirement
7) A kids tab, where I visualize out the total costs by month all the way through 4 years of college.
8) A Dependent care/HSA tab, where I track the spending in those areas to make sure I take full advantage of those accounts every year.
9) A Cash Flow tab. Love this one, probably my favorite. I go out 20+ years...each row is a week worth of spending and income, and it is just something for me to anticipate how much money we're expecting to have at a given point in the future. Helps me be reasonable when it comes to bigger ticket spending like vacations and home improvements.
10) A work bonus tab. just making sure we get what we're owed by our employers for each year's performance.

I've added tabs and deleted them over the years to fit my needs. I've never liked the out of the box software products out there...so this is it for me. My goal is to become FI such that I can not obsess over certain things (like the cash flow one), and I can pour more energy into others (eventually I want a philanthropy tab with some real MMM-like numbers on it)...

KYFIRE

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Re: Mint? Personal Capital? or a plain old spiral notebook?
« Reply #13 on: September 12, 2022, 02:28:59 PM »
I use Mint to keep a visual on my accounts but use Excel for actual planning and tracking. 

With Mint I like having everything in one place so I can take a quick glance and see if any strange charges (which I've found), quick check of the monthly statements, and I can download all the transactions.  It certainly isn't perfect but neither am I so it provides what I need.  For the most part it puts my transactions in the proper categories but I tend to focus on the totals more. 

For Excel, I've made a large multi-tabbed file that I have a budget that's updated every 6 months, monthly status, summary tracking (student loan debt, car debt, mortgate, etc ), FI planned vs actual vs projection, etc.  I'm sure it could be streamlined and whatnot but I enjoy getting my nerd on every month to update.