The best things in life are free…

Customized Mint budget (taken from Mint.com)

To quote another Beatles song that more accurately describes my relationship with money: “I don’t like you, but I love you. Seems that I’m always thinking of you. Oh, you treat me badly, I love you madly. You really got a hold on me.”

I’ve recently discovered a few interesting ways of saving money that are all about this interweb thing.

Graph of all budgets (taken from Mint.com)

Wesabe vs. Mint: I started out with Wesabe because Wired covered it. They gave it high marks and I tend to trust Wired, except when it comes to spending money. Their majority demographic is clearly a few tax brackets above me. I remember when they took a whole page to bring us the virtues of a two thousand dollar stroller.

Point is, I went to Wesabe’s page right away and signed up with them. Wesabe is an online tool used to monitor income and spending. You can tag purchases, make budgets, and get tips on saving money. It’s pretty neat. When it works. See, you have to go through this process of signing up your bank account, so that Wesabe can download all the info it needs to do the nifty graph things it does. But for some reason it was having trouble with one of my accounts. My most important one. Half the time it couldn’t log on to my credit union to get all my checking and saving info. And the other half of the time it could. Weird, yes? Yes. John has the same credit union and was having the same problem. We never did figure out why. We tried talking to Wesabe directly, but they weren’t too interested in our little problems.

This brings us to Mint. In the article about Wesabe Wired briefly mentioned Mint, Wesabe’s older nemesis. So, Boy and I decided to give Mint a try. Mint is a dream. We’ve had absolutely no problems getting our information on the site. In fact, the process is instant and automatic, so you can log on and check your spending in the time it takes to tie your shoes. This means that when a friend asks us if we want to go to sushi we check our spending while on the phone to figure out if our restaurant budget has any sushi room.

Mint is also excessively customizable. John and I pass money back and forth a lot. I’ll go to the store and he’ll pay me back for half the amount. This kind of thing confused Wesabe. It thought I was spending a lot more on groceries and bills than I said I wanted to or had money to do.

“Nope,” it would tell me. “You are out of money. According to my calculations you’ve spent your paycheck already on bills and food. No sushi for you.”

But, in fact, transfers were happening. Mint let’s you take entire transactions out of the mix and split transactions. So, we told it to ignore all bank transfers. Which it has done perfectly. And I split grocery trips in half in Mint, one half is labeled as groceries, the other as a transfer (and it is then taken out of consideration.) Brilliant, I tell you. Oh yeah, and it emails you when your accounts are low or when you’re close to maxing out your self-determined budget for something. Go try Mint. Budgeting has never been so fun.

The pictures above are not from my accounts, but from Mint’s homepage. If you were to see my budgeting you’d know. I’d spend all my money on groceries and plants and less than $30 a month on gas. Because I’m eighty already.