Why I Broke Down and Joined Mint

This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman.

I haven’t tracked our expenses since June.

Not to appear completely incompetent, I do check our accounts on a regular basis to verify the charges and withdrawals. But I can’t tell you how much we spent on groceries in August or how much we spent on fuel in October without printing out some statements and manually doing the math.

For a long time, I dutifully downloaded our statements at the end of each month and uploaded them into Quicken on my desktop (I have an old version of Quicken). I’d go through each expense, verifying its category. The process took an hour or so, mainly because I’d have to go online to look up check payees, but I did it without fail.

Then I fell behind a month. And one month turned into two. The more I fell behind, the more I dreaded updating our accounts since I knew my procrastination meant the process would take much longer. How could I remember in October why we withdrew $40 from an ATM in August?

This month, my husband enrolled at a trade school. His schedule will change after starting school, and that will translate to a change in his salary. We’re trying to figure out our best option. The first thing we needed to look at was our budget. But without some recent figures, we had no idea what we’ve been spending in each category.

Budgeting FAIL.

After getting those numbers the really-hard-and-no-fun way (manually), I started to think about joining Mint.

Why I didn’t join before
I held out for two reasons. One was security concerns. But in the comments of Get …