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Keeping transactions categorized in Mint easily takes me a couple hours per month. Many restaurants/bars/online shops have terrible metadata for their transacti
by jsolson 11y ago
Keeping transactions categorized in Mint easily takes me a couple hours per month. Many restaurants/bars/online shops have terrible metadata for their transactions, in my experience. I typically have ~300 txn/month between my wife and I. Most of them take no time at all. The ones where I have to dig due to crap metadata usually take 5-10 minutes apiece.
I've mostly decided it's not worth it, but every couple months I'll ask "how did we spend this much?!" and categorize everything only to discover it was my new ski gear all along and I'd just forgotten it.
- Vraxx 11y agoHonestly I had the exact same problem. The solution for me was still pretty simple though, I just changed how often I would examine/categorize the information. I had much better recall of what transactions I have approved over the past couple of days rather than over the past month and it takes much less time overall.
- bhandziuk 11y agoI use YNAB which is basically the manual version of Mint. It imports exactly nothing for you. You must log into your bank account/credit card and log each transaction and categorize it yourself. This might take me 30 minutes per month. If you wait until the end of the month it will take longer because you'll forget what you did at the start of the month. You need to keep up with it like anything else.
- lfowles 11y agoFellow YNAB user... how often do you reconcile? I try to do it at the end of the month and it can get a little overwhelming.
- andrewaylett 11y agoYou can import records in bulk from online banking exports, though, which is what I do to get my transactions in the system, and if it sees a payee it's seen before then it'll automatically suggest a category. You do still have to approve every transaction, which I think is useful.