Bites and Mint

So God is really trying to tell me something. I think I got bit by a spider on Sunday night. The bite was largely fine yesterday (thank God!), but it may be because I was drinking insane amounts of water, and took some aspirin (fending off the normal Monday headache). Today, it has decided to swell a bit more, throb in pain and puss out. At least, this time this is on my ankle, a completely hidden part of my body, instead of my face. Don't worry, I already called my good for nothing Dermatologist and setup an appointment. I hadn't been to a dermatologist IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, and this past 3 months I would have seen her 3 times. And every time I'm there for like 5 minutes, as she looks at me quickly, tells me it's going away, perscribes me some expensive cream and tells me not to eat spicy food or get flustered, then takes my $25 copay. Seriously, in 5 minutes.

On to the main purpose of this post.

As most of you know, I have this awesome (as in efficient, not necessarily wise ^_^) budget that I created on Excel. Of course though, it has some limitations. It's very time intensive when looking up and entering transactions and I've never been able to figure out how to effectively integrate my student loans on there. So I finally gave in and opened up a Mint account, something I had been hearing about for awhile. It's one of many free budget tools online. It hooks up into all your accounts (checking, savings, brokerage, 401K, IRA's, loans, credit cards, name the financial institution and it's on there) and compiles them all. I think the coolest part about it is the pie charts as shown below.


This was already something I was trying to do in my dinky Excel, but the chart is amazing. Say you have like a high-level pie chart with like Home, Food and Dining, etc. categories, you can click on a category (like Food and Dining) and it shows you what percentages of it were Restaurants, Fast Food, Groceries, then click on Restaurants, it shows you all the restaurants you've been to and how much you spent on it (my example is up there, if you can read it). It's insane! I never knew that I pretty much don't visit sit down restaurants more than once or twice in a month! I'm quite a restaurant fiend! To the right of the chart marks the frequency you did business at a particular place.

What's below the pie chart is also interesting because you can compare how much you spend to how much other people who use Mint spend in any city. And it even does it per business. So basically I can compare how much people spend in NY at French Roast on average to how much I spend in a month! There's really a lot more to it and here is a fuller review. I'm just highlighting what I think are the coolest features I've played with so far.

It's really easy to use, and once it's setup, it's setup automatically as in it refreshes the accounts by itself. I think the most tedious part in setting up is just looking through the transactions and putting them in the right categories. But a lot of them are really automatically there (like it recognizes Ann Taylor as Clothing). I'll probably keep using my Excel budget, just because it gives me a remarkable amount of control and I can see the impact of a transaction whenever I want to, not like wait around until it hits my account. But getting to play with the charts in this thing, getting reminders about when a credit card bill is due, and getting to check only this site to see if something has gone through (as in I don't have to go to all the different websites of all my different banks and credit cards) are good additions to the way I manage and analyze my money.

So yeah, this is another post on money...but I've got the time on my hands and the attention span to match. I don't know if any of you would actually go and do this, but I think it's super cool. Any interest out there? Comments?