Back to Mint

10/31/15

Back in May, I left Mint. In August, I started collecting all my receipts and filling out a JSON file by hand. This worked mostly fine, though I lost a lot of spending that didn't have a physical receipt.

This month, however, I have all of October's receipts in that box I keep unprocessed receipts. I have also decided to stop entering each individual item in each receipt and just use the totals. Each item of the receipt is simply far more resolution than I currently plan on using.

Because of my huge backlog, and my lowering of necessary spending resolution, it occurs to me that I can make use of small subset of what Mint offers.

Specifically, I only care about:

• Allocating all spending into one place
• Spending categories
• Downloading transcation history to spreadsheet

The problems I had encountered before with Mint was me not liking their budgetting system, not liking their lack of API, not liking their clunky "split receipt" setup for spending from stores with multiple spending categories, and in general not liking being their product, regardless of how sincere they appear about providing a good experience for me above selling me to their affliates.

There's nothing I can do about that last thing. Really, I mostly just feel that that last thing is what has resulted in the lack of an API and some of the other things I don't like about Mint.

The "splitting receipts" problem has been solved by me splitting purchases up into their separate spending types. I just need tell Mint what each receipt is now. And for a large amount of receipts, Mint will already know.

Not liking their budgetting system is solved by me using my own. Though, really, what I care about is the visualization of my tracked spending. I want good data on my spending so I can properly tweak it as I desire. If a budget ends up being that strategy, so be it, but really I found the frequency of my spending on certain types of spending seems to be the positive change in my spending habits (aka, shopping everyday).

The lack of API is "solved" by me just grabbing the data I care about via the "export to CSV" feature on their site. I will use Mint for what I like about it, gather that into something properly computer-readable, and then build the stuff I want around it.

The long-term goal will be to erase Mint's usefulness, but for now, it solves problems I don't feel like thinking about. I don't devote much time to my personal finance tool, I should work on it as efficiently as possible.

The goal from here will be to read Mint spreadsheet stuff into the format I want to work with. I'll need personal systems and digital systems to formalize to make sure I grab all the data regularly, and process it how I want it processed.