BiggerPockets

Bryan,
I use two spreadsheets to track my spending/bills/investments. One spreadsheet lists the monthly expenses and another tab on the spreadsheets list my income and investments.

The other spreadsheet I use I found on a website that I'm subscribed to (The Eventual Millionaire - Jaime Tardy). I was getting frustrated recently as my wife started working after a year off due to pregnancy. I was wondering where all our money went every month. This spreadsheet you just type in where you spend your money for each month. This way I can see where our money is going.

I've never had an urge to use Mint.com.

Tom

Yeah...I have a spreadsheet for my investments and Quickbooks files. That is plenty to keep track of without goofing with my personal expenses too. Mint.com isn't perfect, but I was hoping it may be good enough because I won't track this information too.

Thanks Ed. I read some blog posts about it and it appears that they addressed many of the problems with the original versions. Do you have your credit card, debit card, mortgages, etc. tied to it or just a few items?

I use mint. Mint is owned by Inuit, who purchased it to replace quicken. Quicken was very secure, and Mint is equally so. It's read-only, so you do risk a hacker getting information about your accounts, but not access to your accounts directly.

I would not hesitate to try it, Bryan. It gives you a reasonable breakdown on your spending habits, and a simple view of your stock investments. The only thing I don't like about it is the advertising spam. It's a well built product.

I've been using mint for about 2 years and love it. I use it to track all my expenses - personal expenses and real estate. I have it tied into all my credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, and mortgages. What I use most is the trends graph over time, which allows me to see my personal expenses and income over time. There are a bunch of other useful graphs like net worth graph and all the data can be exported to spread sheet. As far as separating personal and real estate income/expenses I created a custom tag "real estate" and tag all real estate activity with that tag. In the trends view you have the ability to hide transactions that have a specific type of tag. It's great way to consolidate all your transactions in case if you need to go back a few months or years to track down a particular expense.

I almost have all of my accounts set up. The challenge questions seem to be too challenging to me since I don't log in to my accounts very often.

This is a great tool from what I have seen. Is there a way to train the tool to recognize transactions from certain vendors as certain categories?

It will also learn as time goes by. Most vendors it will recognize I've noticed. But yes, just click on always rename. and you can change the category as well.s

I use the budgeting feature for personal expenses, but fairly loosely. It's a way for me to quickly see on the dashboard once you login how my personal spending is going throughout the month for each budget category. If I didn't create budget categories I would have to go to the trends and pull graphs, etc., which requires a few more steps.

It's definitely help me identify where my money is going each month and be more conscience with my spending. Of course, this all relies that all your transactions are properly categorized.

I have our personal stuff (credit cards, bank accounts, etc.) set up with it to track our personal expenses. I track our business stuff in Quickbooks. Our accountant is going to give me several lessons this year to get me up to speed more with RE accounting and taxation. This is probably my weakest area of real estate right now so '12 is going to be spent rounding out this rough edge for us.

I'm not using it for my investment accounts. I just want something to track expenses from a few different sources. Dual use items for personal and business stuff can be linked quickly to give us an accurate cash flow accounting at a high level without investing a ton of time banging stuff into a customized spreadsheet.