Mint.com just added a feature that may make your life that much easier and help you reach those financial goals you’ve been dreaming about. There are many tools out there for tracking your finances and setting up budgets. These range from desktop applications to web apps like Mint, Buxfer, and Xpensr. Most will tie into your bank accounts and keep your financial data updated directly from the source.
While this gives you a clear picture of where you stand, it doesn’t really do much for you in the long run. You know how much money you have in savings, but what are you saving for? You have a clear snapshot of what’s available in your checking account, but what should you do from there? This is where financial planning comes into play and it’s probably a topic that most people cringe from. Even if you have clear goals in mind, it’s often hard to see the path to those goals in your daily transactions.
In the past, you would need to do a lot of guess-work to figure out what type of budgets to set. Even with the advanced budgeting features in Mint, while they take your activity and other variables into account, still require you to make stuff up. Mint’s new Goals feature aims to take some of the burden from you and make this type of planning simpler.
As we dig ourselves out of debt or try to figure out the right decisions to make for our future, Mint’s Goals is the perfect companion. Once you’ve logged into Mint, you should see a new tab labeled Goals which takes you to the overview page. Most of the common goals that you might have are already here: paying off a credit card, saving for a car, going on vacation. If none of these presets fit for your goal, you can choose to create a Custom Goal.
Each goal runs you through a series of questions specific to that goal. Your answers help Mint figure out what your next steps should be. For instance, if you want to buy a new car, Mint will ask you whether you have a price in mind or a specific type of vehicle. It also offers a link to the KBB to estimate the cost of your dream car. There is also a feature where you can upload an image of your goal. Imagery definitely goes a long way to helping you stay focused.
Once your goal is set up, in can be tracked using an existing bank account or a new one. If you do not attach the goal to an account, it obviously cannot be tracked. Once you have assigned a goal to an account, you cannot assign any other goals to that account. This will help you to keep things simple and do one thing at a time. You can, however, attach a goal to multiple accounts. This comes in handy if you want to include your regular savings account and a long-term investment account.
Mint does a good job in pulling out the details necessary for you to reach your goals, but you have to actually do the work. A few tips from the Mint blog include:
- Creating a separate account – it’s hard to mentally separate your money when you’re in a fix, so just make a separate account. You will be less likely to spend your savings if you make them a little harder to access.
- Be realistic – you know how much you make a month, so don’t go budgeting for a house you saw on cribs just because the computer says you can.
- Use automatic deposits – don’t rely on yourself to put the money away. Take advantage of direct deposit and make it so that you never even see the money.