April 2010 Monthly Recap

Whoo-hoo, I hit yet another all-time networth high at the end of April: $445,960. The stock market was up, I didn't spend too much, and my outstanding credit card balance was lower, so everything went in the right direction. You can see the details at NetworthIQ.

As for income and expenses, one thing to note was that I got a state tax refund of $926 this month. I did my taxes back in February but I guess I was one of the people caught up in New York State's cash crunch, in which many refunds were delayed. Here's the rest of the details by category:

Taxes Deducted	$2,070
Housing & Utilities	$2,049
Dining	$653
Gifts Given	$205
Misc	$182
Household	$127
Information & Entertainment	$98
Clothing	$90
Travel	$77
Gym & Fitness	$22
Medical	-$187
Total Outflows	$5,385
Salary (before taxes)	$8,017
Interest & Other Income	$282
Total Inflows	$8,299
Net	$2,913

I didn't include the tax refund there so total net was actually $3,839. I almost can't believe it's that high, but I guess I just didn't do much spending this month. Dining was pretty normal, gifts were things for my niece and nephew's birthdays and a few miscellaneous things I bought when they visited me. The miscellaneous category is a haircut, some conditioner, a notebook, and an iPhone case. Information & Entertainment includes internet access, a book, some iPhone apps, some music from iTunes, and Netflix and New York Times subscriptions. Medical is negative because an insurance reimbursement came through. Gym & Fitness was a new pair of swim goggles. Household included a new alarm clock, some batteries, drycleaning and an extra iPhone charger. (This iPhone is costing me a lot of money not only in terms of the device and the monthly fee, but also in various accessories as I try to figure out what sort of case is best, what apps I want to use, and how to keep the *&*%!^ battery charged while playing with it constantly!)

Anyway, that was my month in money, and it was a pretty good one. I don't think May's picture will be as pretty, but you never know! Onwards and upwards....

Mint Adds Manual Transactions

Mint.com has added a feature many people wanted: the ability to enter cash transactions and manually enter future transactions in other accounts. But the way it works is a little weird.

Let's look first at adding manual transactions, for instance to a checking account. This makes a lot of sense, as you really need to know what pending transactions could affect your account balance. You can enter a future check with a check number and later, when that check has actually cleared against your bank account, it will be automatically reconciled so you don't have a duplicate entry. I'm not sure how this would work with a savings account where there's no check number to help with matching the transactions.

As for cash transactions, I don't like the way they've implemented this. You can add a random transaction that isn't counted against any account if you just want to track cash expenses against a budget, but there's no way to maintain a cash account and enter expenses against it. Instead, they want you to assign your cash transactions to your recent ATM transactions, which some people were using as a workaround already. I guess they've made it a little easier to do that, but they've missed half the point of bothering to track cash in the first place. Cash is cash, and what matters is the total you have and the total you spend-- why would you need to assign it to a particular ATM transaction? And what if you receive payment in cash and then spend that money?

Another thing worth noting is that you can't yet enter new transactions from the iPhone app, which is really a necessity. Mint says they're working on adding that soon, though.

You can read more about this all works at the Mint Blog. Some of the comments bring up these exact issues so perhaps they'll listen to their users and make some changes.

But on the positive side, after using Mint for a couple of months now, I have to say that there is a lot to like about it. It's very easy to set up and I love being able to check my balances and see transactions on my iPhone. That makes it all the more frustrating that they have left a lot of good features out-- I wish I could see how the individual stocks and mutual funds in my portfolios were doing on my iPhone (showing how much they were up or down, not just the current price), rather than just a total balance. I wish the budgeting categories were a little more flexible. And the cash transaction thing is just bizarre. Let's hope they keep refining this without heading off in the wrong direction...