Where Does the Money Go? U.S. Consumer Unit Expenditures
I would love to see this for other G8 countries. Reading is $118? I’m willing to bet that every other G8 country spends at least 2-3x that per year.
How to Make Mint.com Relevant
I have been using Mint.com for a while now. It’s a compelling product, but I usually find it difficult to learn anything useful about my habits. The charts and tables are always skewed by unusually large and rare transactions like rent and bills. Fortunately, a co-worker showed me how to hide these anomalies using tags and preferences.
If you’re like me and you want to see a more accurate breakdown of your spending habits then follow these simple steps in your Mint.com account.
1. Manage your tags
When you click “Edit Details” for a specific transaction, there’s an option to “Manage your tags. Here you can see I added “Ignore” and “Rent” for the transactions that skew my data.
2. Tag your transactions
Click “Edit Details” for a specific transaction you wish to ignore, select one of your new tags.
3. Hide tags
Go to Your Profile and click on the Hide button. Select the tags you want to hide from planning and trends. For me this included my Ignore and Rent tags.
Now go to Trends and start playing around. Pretty horrifying isn’t it? I bet you had no idea how much you spent at Starbucks this year.
