Money Management for Idiots (Like Me)

by Oct 22, 2007

A big priority for me and my family is wise stewardship of the resources God has put under our care. We always want to make sure we’re storing up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6) more than we’re laying up treasure for ourselves so we can relax, eat, drink, and be merry (Luke 12). But this lofty ideal tends to break down when it comes down to the details. I hate details.

Once or twice a year, our family creates a new budget. Then we make a renewed commitment to track our spending using Quicken. That usually lasts for a month or two. At most. It’s just way too much of a pain to import the data and assign a category in our budget to every… single… transaction.

All that changed a few weeks ago when we started using Mint.com. It’s a free online money-management tool that requires about as much brainpower as signing the credit card receipt at Best Buy. We’re all pretty good at that, considering the fact that credit card debt in America is now at an all-time high of $9300 per household.

Mint takes only a few minutes to set up, and then it automatically imports all your bank account and credit card transactions every night. What’s cool is that it automatically assigns each transaction to a category (and it’s almost always right). Even cooler, it will send you alerts by email or text message if you’re spending more than you should be in a category. You can even set it to alert you when your account balance drops below a certain limit, or when a credit card bill is due soon.

Tracking our spending has suddenly gone from excruciating pain to not-quite-but-almost-pleasure. And hopefully the result will be that we can use more of our money for more eternal things.