Executive Summary
Mint.com is a free personal finance service that is provided by Intuit. It easily syncs all your various financial accounts in one place. You can also setup budgets and Mint.com will automatically categorize your purchases in the various budgeted categories. Mint.com has been on Time Magazines 50 top websites for the last three years in a row.
The issue that I identified with the website was the lack of detailed spending information and easy ways to calculate personal financial ratios. With my project I set out to create a MS Excel spreadsheet to automatically retrieve my information from Mint.com. With this information I wanted to better know how much I had spent and how much left I had to spend in the month. Also, I wanted to get up to date key personal financial ratios. Previously I had to copy and paste the information I needed into MS Excel to be able to calculate the ratios.
To be able to more easily see the how much I had spent and how much I had left was to convert the numbers into percentages. The first percentage that I calculated was my percentage spent of the monthly allowance. This indicates my monthly progress and how well I am performing. The second percentage is how much I have spent on a weekly basis. This will help me see my weekly performance and improve my spending habits.
The key personal financial ratios that I want to track are: Housing Payment Ratio, Liquidity Ratio, Solvency Ratio, and Debt to Income Ratio. As a college student that is close to graduation I am becoming more concerned with these financial ratios because I am going to start saving for a home. By tracking these ratios I can easily see my true financial health, and strive to improve them.
The program that I built will automatically go out to Mint.com and import all of my budget categories and the various purchases that I have made in the corresponding categories. The program will then calculate the percentage spent in each category on a monthly and weekly basis. The program will then calculate the key personal financial ratios, mentioned above. The program also gives the user the ability to send an e-mail or text to a significant other to invite them to a personal financial meeting to review the current progress.
Here is the link to my Paper:
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/11w/mus40000/Mint.com.pdf
Here is the link to my MS Excel File:
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/11w/mus40000/mint_program.xlsm
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