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Ashcans posted:2) If you are talking about a totally one-off purchase, you can use the 'goal' function to account for this. Basically you can play with how much you want to contribute vs. your timeframe and establish a goal payment (say, $50 a month to buy a new computer until you reach $800 or whatever). That goal payment then becomes part of your budget each month until the goal is met. It works best if you connect it to a specific account, but that is more applicable to larger/longer goals like retirement or emergency funds, because it's not like you are going to open a separate savings account for your computer money. I've been using the goal feature for saving in the long-term for trips and stuff. Luckily I have a couple savings accounts set up just for this before I found Mint - having a relatively automated system to help me budget for large expenses is cool. Honestly, I barely used the accounts I set up previously thanks to going to grad school, but it's nice they were available now. However, what do I do with the charges that come through? If it was a single large purchase (just finished a goal, so I'm thinking of saving up for a $$ tube amplifier next) I think I would just exclude the transaction from Mint. However, I just finished saving a chunk of change for travel. Is it easiest to just exclude every charge from Mint? There will probably be a ton of small charges 
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Jun 27, 2013 16:35
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drat Bananas posted:Very nitpicky question, but I'm curious how other people categorize this. I'm making a spreadsheet of how much I have spent where, and I have both a category for "eating out" (restaurants, going out for drinks) as well as "entertainment" (sporting events, movies). If I bought concessions at the movies/sporting event, would it make more sense to count it as eating out or entertainment? Or should it depend if it replaced a meal or was just a snack/drink? Or do most people just lump eating out and entertainment into one category anyway? I have three separate categories in play here - entertainment (specifically the sporting events sub category for this one), fast food, and restaurants. I use 'fast food' for the "too lazy to cook" meals; this ends up being lunches for the most part, and helps me limit the number of times I'll go out during the week to a reasonable level. 'Restaurants' is used for nice planned dinners, which is really in a separate category so I remember to bring the girlfriend out on date nights occasionally :shh: For your specific question, I would add the tickets to the obvious sporting events. If I was having just a small item (say, popcorn at the movies) I would consider it part of the entertainment. If I was having a replacement meal (say a hot dog + french fries at a baseball game) I would consider using fast food instead of lumping it into entertainment. My rule of thumb is usually "am I saving this money for this particular purpose?"
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Jul 2, 2013 18:26
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