Question for Mint.com users

[lucigo]

I've been using this site for a few months thanks to this board, but am confused about the credit card section, it shows a negative number and is making my brain hurt. If I want to pay off credit card debt but still use a credit card for everyday expenses, should I budget for a negative number?

Or is it negative because I paid at the end of the month and it shows up at the beginning of the next month, and should it always come out to zero because both the paid from and the paid to accounts are listed?

 

[xCourxCorex]

Any time you have a purchase (on a credit card, debit card etc), or a loan, it shows as "a negative".. it's just showing what you spent, not that your balance is actually less than zero. "Income" or "positive money" will show in green, spending, or debts will show in black with a "-" in front.

 

[mistysue]

I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what you are asking, but if you mean the payment itself being negative - if you have both the credit card and the bank account the payment came from linked, you should tell the payment transaction that it is a transfer. Sometimes it will just show up as a random deposit or a random withdrawl, you have to switch both to say transfer.

Is that the issue?

 

[lucigo]

Lets say I pay $500 toward a credit card. There is a transaction that says transfer from bank to credit card that takes $500 out of my checking account. Then there is a transaction that says transfer to credit card on my credit card account for $500, so they zero each other out and it doesn't actually tell me how much I have paid towards my credit cards each month. That said, there is a place also that says interest charged, and shows where the interested charged to my credit cards has been paid.

At this point I'm thinking the only way to see how much I'm actually paying off every month is to watch my net worth?

 

[Golf4food]

You can still tag transactions on the credit card into spending categories and set a budget for those each month and also set a credit card payment category. You can also exclude transactions as duplicates if they are showing double. Mint takes a little tweaking to customize to your specific needs, but that is also one of the good things about it - it CAN be customized to your specific needs once you know what to do.