Mint budgeting
I don’t like Mint’s new ‘budgeting’ tools. If you have something that occurs twice annually it’s really not too easy to budget for it using their tool.
First mint assumes that if you paid 188 for home insurance that it’s 32 a month for home insurance. That’s based on Mint’s faulty assumptions of how often bills come due and attempts at intelligence.
First, Mint looks backward six months instead of 13 to find the last similar payment to a similar payee it seems. Then it compounds the error if it finds none and tries to divide the amount of a lump-sum payment to payee by dividing the value of said lump sum by 6. This is a number completely unsupported by any sort of fact.
It reminds me of the alerts on my iPhone that this month I spent 500 on mortgage, and that I usually spend 300. No, I spent around 800 on mortgage, and I fairly consistently spend 800 on mortgage. Again, faulty logic.
Car insurance I may pay 400 every 6 months, so I tell Mint I want to budget 400 every six months. so I tell mint 400 and every 6 months. My last was in August (this month, of course) and it turns the first number (400 a month, wtf? Some people do pay their bill when it comes due to avoid $6/mo fees from their insurer) into 66 a month which is good so far. I guess you have to put it in ‘rollover’ budget to collect the money till it hits 400 at 6 months and then you actually accrue the cost on your books.
But my problem with the whole mess is this: what is the point? I could get my budget down to one top level category at a time like “household” which includes mortgage or rent, home insurance if paid individually, maintenance fees, etc. but I don’t really see the point in going through the effort because that’s basically in an umbrella I’d rather call “fixed costs”.
Except you can’t combine all of your fixed costs because they are in different categories at the top level and MINT WON’T LET YOU DO THAT. You can click little pluses next to sub-categories, but you can’t combine them.
Food and dining is nice, but I want to be able to separate lunches from dinners out. I want to separate groceries for eating in at the office versus groceries for home. I don’t care how much my mortgage is each month and if I “Nail” that budget (make it red because I’m at the spending limit) because THAT’S NOT WHAT BUDGETS ARE FOR ARGH.
In fact this budgeting paradigm is so pointless. You have fixed costs (which you can negotiate down) and you have variable costs which you can adjust habits to bring down. Budgeting is a way of keeping the latter down because you can’t really help the former.
However, I’d like to “budget for” future events, like my next tax bill on my car, my next insurance bill for same car, my annual condo policy premium, etc. I don’t want these charges “pantsing” me. For this, I have to rely on other tools and Mint falls down.