Mint.com Money Management Makes Holiday and New Year's Budgeting Easy Aaron Patzer started Mint.com out of frustration in November, 2005 when he just wanted to create a rough budget for his holiday spending!


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Aron Patzer: Hi, I'm Aron Patzer the founder and CEO of mint.com. It's the holidays and you don't want be a Scrooge with your gift giving, but you also don't want to go massively into debt. Speaker: I haven't gone onto debt. I'm pretty much done with my shopping, but I got one step more than I thought I was going to do. Speaker: Now everything is in line for my holiday spending Speaker: It is pretty good Speaker: Yeah, I have usually, start saving up ahead of time and I buy presents throughout the year. Speaker: I'm not dead at all, but than again, I don't know neither so -- Speaker: And you are not done shopping. Speaker: And I'm not done shopping. Aron Patzer: As a general rule, I recommend not spending more than one, two week pay check on your holidays spendings so if you make $60,000 a year, it's probably about $1,500 as a two week after tax take home and that's $1,500 for gifts, decorations, the bottles of wine that you bring to parties, everything altogether. Speaker: I know where my money goes. I check it, but I'm surprised by the end of the month sometimes how much I have spent, yeah. Speaker: Well, I spend a lot of money traveling, but drinking, going out, everything that's short term and doesn't get me anywhere. Aron Patzer: Now, for most people budgeting is a dirty word, it's a difficult thing to stick to and that's largely because most tools out there and most books on budgeting go about it the wrong way. So instead of constantly monitoring your finances, instead of logging into your bank everyday, instead of keeping a journal of all your purchases, mint.com does all that for you. Most people don't need to budget every single category. You usually have a few problem areas. You know that you go out to restaurants too much, you know you spend a little too much on clothes or you buy a few too many DVDs and really, you just need to watch those categories and everything else leave a B. So if you see over the past three of four months you have been spending $300 a month on restaurants, you probably don't want to set a $50 budget, it's just not realistic and you are just going to frustrate yourself. So instead, set a $250 budget and then the next month set a $200 budget and keep going down until you reach your goal. So in sum, you really only need to budget and watch a few problem areas whether you are budgeting for the holidays or whether you are budgeting for the New Year. You want to set a realistic budgets based on your historic spending, don't cut too hard or too fast or you will not be able to stick with it and you want to use a tool like mint.com that monitors your spending from all the different credit cards and debit cards, just set it up once and check it once a week, every couple of weeks and if anything goes wrong, if you go over your budget mint will send you an e-mail, it will send you a text message and it's a really easy way to stick with your budgets.