Today is the end of a family institution.
For the last ten years I've written a financial summary for us once a month, every month. I would login to mint.com, sort all of the data into the appropriate categories, and then type it up and send it to Julie. Mint was great. It was easy to use, intuitive, and free.
For these reasons alone it was doomed.
Intuit is discontinuing Mint and trying to move all of its users over to Credit Karma, which is not going to be particularly useful to us. We've been switching over (with some help from Excel-savvy friends) to homemade spreadsheet tracking over the first part of this year.
But it will be sad to no longer have the written financial summaries. There have been some gems over the years.
Apparently back in 2014 we needed to have a line item just for purchases of pens. But, then again, our entire monthly childcare expenses were only $25 back then.
There were student loan payments back then, and a running talley of how many months were left in each car payment.
There were some notably bad months. The header to the email for the August 2015 summary is:
"August Financial Summary (WTF)" (Life insurance due, car insurance, and several major home repairs)
It was apparently in 2016 that I started labeling trumpets as "Business Expenses" whenever I bought them.
I recognize many of the transactions, but some are completely bewildering. I have no idea what we would have spent $5 on at a Sears in 2017. (Did we run out of diapers in a semi-abandoned mall?)
I started to keep running percentages of a yearly budget on a month to month basis at some point during that year, but it must have been too much work--that was abandoned fairly quickly.
There are also a number of destruction related lines that I find as the kids get older.
"Window replacement--James/baseball."
"Library book that Felix tore the pages out of."
"Treadmill repair visit which accomplished absolutely nothing."
But, to be fair, there aren't nearly as many of these as
"Another piccolo trumpet mouthpiece that didn't work."
We'll miss you, Mint. You are a good reminder of when we used to buy diapers every month...
