"Envelope" System?

[Dana]

I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to personalize Mint to mimic an "envelope" system?

For cash-carrying people, you pretty much take your paycheck and divide the cash up into separate envelopes, which match your budget. i.e. If your Fast Food budget is $25 a month, when you get your paycheck, you put in $25.00 into the Fast Food envelope. Once you spend it from there, it's gone.

Obviously this doesn't really work with an electronic system without some modifications.

To mimic this in MS Money, I have it split my paycheck into multiple accounts or categories (I don't remember which, now), which give that account/category a positive balance.

Then, when I spend the money, it deducts the amount from each of the positive categories/accounts.

It is similar to Mint's budget feature, but allows for carry-over from month-to-month. For example, if you spend $200 every 6 months for vehicle maint, your budget would be $33.34 per month, and that category would increase each month until you spend it.

The other adjustment would be that, for budgets, the "bar" would work towards $0 to reflect the amount left to spend, rather than working up towards your budget amount.

Any ideas?

[mburdsall]

if you go to mvelopes.com I think you will see what you are asking for. We are hoping that Mint applies some of these ideas to Mint in future releases.

[bhaughery]

Mint, please apply mvelopes ideas. I love your program but cask envelope system is a great tool.

[socalgal]

Originally Posted by mburdsall

if you go to mvelopes.com I think you will see what you are asking for. We are hoping that Mint applies some of these ideas to Mint in future releases.

We are on a partial envelope system for our budgeting, and would love to use Mint more easily for our cash expenditures and cash tracking.

[conn8D]

We tried Mvelopes and loved the layout and how it (should have) worked. Unfortunately the ""customer service" was HORRIBLE and they have a LOT of problems getting transactions accurately from financial institutions. Missed transactions were a regular thing - which made reconciling a nightmare - we finally gave up.

We're giving Mint a try, but so far we're skeptical. . . . It doesn't even tell you if your budgeted income is less than your projected spending!

And what about one-time income (birthday check from Grandma!) - where should that go? What if my transmission needs to be replaced? Do I have to create "transmission" as a new one-time budget category? What if I decide to forgo my vacation and take that saved up $ to pay for the transmission instead?

I can't figure out how to do these things in Mint - which is disappointing because I REALLY wanted Mint to work. . . .

[twhitex]

Originally Posted by conn8D

. . . We're giving Mint a try, but so far we're skeptical. . . . It doesn't even tell you if your budgeted income is less than your projected spending! . . .

If you enter your Budgeted Income, it shows Projected Savings at the top right of the page.

[ohbejoyful]

Originally Posted by conn8D

And what about one-time income (birthday check from Grandma!) - where should that go? What if my transmission needs to be replaced? Do I have to create "transmission" as a new one-time budget category? What if I decide to forgo my vacation and take that saved up $ to pay for the transmission instead?

I can't figure out how to do these things in Mint - which is disappointing because I REALLY wanted Mint to work. . . .

conn8D, here's how I would handle your challenges:

• One-time Income - deposit the birthday check from Grandma into the bank, and Mint will show it as a bright green positive number. Under the category "Income" you'll see a bunch of options, but since none of them fit perfectly, you can add a subcategory of your own. You can't call it "Gift" since there is already a subcategory called Gift (of the outgoing kind), so I might call it "Gift Income" or "Gift Money" or "Money Gift".
• Transmission - I would think a transmission repair/replace would go under "Auto & Transport / Service & Parts". You could create a budget line for Service & Parts with an amount that rolls over every month. So if you budget $100 every month, it rolls over until you have enough to repair the transmission. Of course, that assumes you are actually saving that money somewhere. It's not a perfect solution. In my own perfect world I would have a savings account like ING that lets me set up subaccounts, and ING automatically divides my deposits among all the sub accounts. Then the savings-type budgets you set up in Mint would just need to reflect what you're doing in ING.

Hope this helps.

[janie_super@yahoo.com]

the ability to make custom categories was key to enabling this.

one time expenses and one time incomes can be added to any month, and deleted from the next months budget

i view each budget line as an envelope.. now if only mint can figure out how to do rollovers properly, we would all be doing great!

[mrscyborat]

My Experience
I was having trouble incorporating our envelope system into Mint.com. I had a spreadsheet I was running that had each category (envelope) of our budget. Each paycheck (on the 15th and the 30th) I would add to the ongoing balance. I would then enter each transaction as a negative number to count down toward a 0 balance in each category. Since I'm not a spreadsheet guru, I didn't really know how to run reports off of it. I would create rows that said "October budget", "October Actual", and "Difference" then proceed to select the range of cells that contained each information. It was a tedious process. Hubby introduced me to Mint.com and I was thrilled...but soon discovered it had some flaws when trying to incorporate the envelope concept. My problems were:

1) The opening budget didn't give me the option of including an opening balance. While you can check the box to have the category carry over, it doesn't let you start off with a balance that you later add to.

2) Our first pay period of the month does not fall on the 1st of the month. The information for the first budget (and possibly proceeding months) would not accurately reflect the current month - some transactions might go through on the first of the month and again on the 30th, making one month way over budget and the next month way under.

3) We were hoping to use the information in real-time decision-making and due to problem #2, we could not make accurate decisions that would ensure our checking account was not overdrawn.

So, after much brainstorming (and a few tears!), I think I figured out some solutions:

1) Our first month is a trial period. I went ahead and budgeted however much we currently had toward that category PLUS what we were going to "add" to the category so that I had a more accurate idea of how much was available to spend (for instance our medical category is pretty large awaiting a bill we know is coming). Instead of trying to balance our budget to our income, I know it will be out of balance (at least the first month) because of the surplus.

2) I based my budgeted numbers for this month on what was left in that category. Since some of this month's income was spent the 30th and 31st of last month, I didn't include that in this month's budget. I also decided to utilize the ability to change the budgeted amount at any time: I only put the budget for each category at what was available for a 1/2 a month until the next paycheck came. When the second paycheck came, I increased the budget to include the second half of the month's amounts. It's a little more work than simply setting the budget once a month, but it's still a LOT less work than what I was doing in my spreadsheet.

3) Besides the above changes, we decided we would not spend anything out of the 30th paycheck until the 1st of the next month. For us, that is an easy solution. For others whose paychecks are not that close, it would be more difficult. That is where Mint would do well to allow for adjustments to the starting and ending of a budget (fiscal month as opposed to actual, etc.).

I'll post a message in a couple of months to let you know if it is working or if we made additional changes.

I apologize for this lengthy post. I just thought others might benefit from the process I went through to allow Mint to work for our envelope mindset.

mrscyborat