Track Home Improvement Expenses with Mint

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Quite often we are whipping out our cash back credit card to pay for the shiny new faucet, classic Carrara Marble tile, or whatever other materials necessary to get our latest home improvement job done. How do you know if you are within your $5,000 new bathroom budget when you have a $10,000 limit on your credit card?*

We just went over how to start saving for your next home improvement project. But how do you keep yourself honest?

Is the money you actually spend within the budget?

Mint is the answer our family uses for tracking home improvement expenses**. Mint.com is a website where you set up a free account to track your financial accounts (there is a phone app too, but I haven’t used it). First, you sync up the accounts you would like to track for saving and spending purposes***. If you’re limiting your account to home improvement projects you are probably most interested in adding your savings account as well as your credit card so you can see the incoming funds as well as the outgoing expenses.

When you track home improvement expenses with Mint you are in control of your budget and spending because you can see all the transactions in one place. Once transactions start getting logged you will be able to dig in to any category you create and track your funds with all kinds of totals by category, merchant, and tag…and with some amazing graphs.

Mint has a few special features making it ideal for home improvement financial tracking:

The ability to label a transaction with tags

While each transaction is defaulted to some kind of category (also editable), Mint allows you to add multiple tags to any transaction. Maybe you want to see how much you’re spending an entire house. However, you would also like to break it down so you can see how much you are spending on the bathroom remodel versus the kitchen upgrades. In this case you would create three separate tags: one for your house, one for the bathroom, and another for the kitchen.

You can see the three tags for bathroom, home and kitchen below. The purchase for this transaction was for the kitchen so I labelled it with both the home and kitchen tags. Likewise, if I have another transaction for the bathroom I would select bathroom and home. (Admittedly, I could just add the bathroom and kitchen numbers together, but sometimes I just want to see it totaled for me in one of the spiffy Mint graphs)

Then, when you are digging down into your overall spending you can break out each smaller category as needed while also seeing how much you have racked up on the entire home.

Here we are viewing the expenses of the bathroom, kitchen and overall home with a bar graph. Although I have double tagged everything with the “home” tag, you can see in the table towards the bottom Mint is smart enough to figure out we have only spent $1,708, not double.

The pie chart is pretty cool too. Both the bar graph and pie chart show the total as well as the number of transactions when you hover over a bar or portion of the pie. You can even click on the transactions to get a further list and breakdown.

Split up transactions

Headed to Home Depot for insulation for the walls of your work-in-progress bathroom remodel and grabbing some air filters for your air conditioner at the same time? Often times we don’t think about running two transactions to keep tracking easier. Mint allows you to take a single transaction and to divide it in as many buckets as needed.

First, you select the transaction you need to split:

Then, the split selection screen appears and you can divide the original transaction into as many smaller transactions as needed:

In the end, you can still tell the individual transactions are related because of the additional icon for a split transaction in the affected rows:

Add cash transactions manually

Sometimes you’re not using a credit card–instead you are only able to pay cash for certain items. Craigslist is a prime example where cash is the only way to go. You’ll discover some amazing prices for some gorgeous light fixtures, but you can only get them if you have cash in hand.

$25 for this wrought iron beauty that is normally $250+? Less than the cost of shipping?!? Yep, I can do cash.

You need a way to capture these cash transactions into your tracking. Mint allows you to enter in cash purchases manually.

Other features

You can set up a budget, goals, and reminders in Mint. I have set up a few budget items and Mint most definitely lights up my email when I’ve gone over budget on any category.

At the same time, we have moved away from goals and reminders options with our high interest savings accounts automatically stashing away our short term savings for any number of projects. Instead, we use Mint for purely tracking our projects. It is worth exploring to see what works best for your situation.

With all of these features, Mint keeps you honest with your budget and expenses. Perhaps you end up wanting to splurge on something. Instead of just telling yourself no (which is also a very good option), Mint allows you to see where you could cut some other life expenses, making up the difference.

If you did not catch it above, Mint is a free tool for you to use. With nothing to lose, try it out!

*Yes, the money is saved up in a high interest savings account, but I use my credit card to get the added benefit of cash back. I pay off the credit card with the money from the account. The credit card is paid in full every month.

**Really, Mint is an app to track all your transactions on all your accounts. We opened an account with the intent to track ALL our different life expenditures. The ability to track home improvement expenses with Mint is just a convenient byproduct. However, it has positively changed our handle on our finances so much that I felt it was VERY IMPORTANT to share on this blog. It is a major tool in your financial and DIY tool chest.

You can track your total net worth numerically and graphically–it’s some very cool nerdery. There is no hiding what you spend on. It is effortless to drill down into different categories and tags. The ability to see your budget, spending, and net worth graphically across time is some very powerful motivation to curb bad habits, keeping a trend moving upward. It is quite addictive…

Don’t look at the graph above for details…there was a lot of cropping and Paint editing to show you this graph, but the point is to give you an idea of the kind of data you can see over time. Second, you can see all the different kinds of tracking Mint makes effortless on the left column.

***I’ll admit to having trust issues entering all the passwords for all my accounts into one location. I ended up taking the plunge when I talked to a few close friends in different social circles over an extremely short period of time–all of whom had Mint accounts! Coincidence? Maybe, but between talking to them and reading MMM’s enthusiastic seal of approval, I called it “mint to be” and took the plunge. I haven’t looked back–loving the nerdery that comes with the graphs along with easily tracking everything in one place.