I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.
I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.
I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.
What have I been missing?
Not everyone benefits from this sort of thing.
I started with Mint when I was single 14 years ago because I wanted to do a better job with saving and be more intentional about knowing where my money went so that I could optimize and really save exactly as much as my income would allow. I never had debt or money trouble, but I felt like I could get more serious about saving towards various goals.
I started by budgeting on a bi-weekly basis, corresponding with my paycheck. I did the budgeting on an actual piece of paper that I printed out with pre-set budget tables that I created on Microsoft Word. I used a calculator and reconciled all my accounts and started collecting data in order to be able to do projections on how much I'd be able to save.
I found this to be super motivating in terms of eliminating impulse buying and planning for discretionary purchases that I really wanted. It also helped eliminate those annoying once-in-a-while expenses, because I started setting up sinking funds for things like car repairs or contact lenses. I was planning for those things and setting money aside, and the budgeting helped me to know how much I needed to set aside and thus how much money was truly available for discretionary spending and saving.
So when I discovered Mint, it was a massive help because it automated all the things that I had previously been doing by hand in a binder. It also set up super nifty graphs and tracked my investments.
When I got married Mint was a total life-saver because both my husband and I check it all the time and use it like crazy to discuss our savings goals and expenditures. We share 100% of our finances and having everything so easily accessible and transparent makes it easy to communicate about what's going on with our money. We feel confident about our savings goals and have no trouble agreeing on our spending. We also love Mint for tax purposes--easy to track charitable giving for the year and make sure we've met our requirements to exceed the standard deduction--and also for our FSA accounts because we can reliably predict our spending on things that are use-or-lose.
There's a bit of a learning curve but to me financial budgeting/tracking tools help me think about our financial life almost as a business, taking the guess-work out of our money decisions.