How a Single 30something in the San Francisco Bay Area Has Spent Money Over the Last Decade

With the devastating news that the Mint we know and love will be shelved in favor of a new interface on Credit Karma, it seems a perfect opportunity to pay homage to the free platform that has helped immeasurably in my financial journey over the last decade.

While Minters technically have until March 23 to move their data to one of Intuit’s other financial tools, Credit Karma will only allow for up to three years of transaction history to make the switch. For diehard Minters like myself who’ve neurotically categorized every purchase they’ve made over the last 10-plus years, the elimination of that much information is akin to losing a limb.

The very personal Impersonal Finances data stored (and no doubt shared several times over with any number of third-party companies) on the Mint servers tells the tale of my financial life. So, before it gets wiped out (Mint does allow you to download your transaction history, should you have a use for it outside of their platform), let’s take a look at some fun transactional trends that have taken place as I’ve “matured” from a 20something with a negative net worth to a late 30something with a somewhat legitimate shot at a somewhat slightly early retirement.

Fun with Mint transaction history: Overall Spending

Let’s dive into the trends! If you’re into personal finance porn, you’ve come to the right place. While I grew leery of sharing my overall net worth with strangers on the internet, I’m somehow completely comfortable with the idea of telling the world the ways in which I’ve lit my money on fire. Let’s start by taking a look at my overall spending since 2013, a full 11 years of data:

Holy lifestyle creep! Keep in mind that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, notorious for its high cost of living, but my 2023 spending is egregious by any standard (and frankly outside of what I can reasonably afford to be spending). Perhaps there is a correlation here between sporadic personal finance blog posting and a new personal record spend north of $68,000? The main culprits: a sizeable ($9,000) annual rent increase (below market rent, at that!), a collision course with some self-induced car maintenance and subsequently jacked up insurance rates (doubled from $1,200 to $2,400 annually), and more “dinners for two” than you’d expect from someone who has categorized all of their purchases on Mint since college.

The other spike on the chart in 2018? The purchase of a gently-used but reliable vehicle for $20,000, paid via lump sum back when I actually knew how to save money. While the car was/is a little nicer than I need it to be, my buy-and-hold philosophy applies to both stocks and cars, so I plan on (more carefully) driving this thing for the next decade.

In summary, cars and rent. Always, cars and rent. But wait, there’s more!

Fun with Mint transaction history: Eat, Drink & Spend Money

By far my most consistently obnoxious spending category over the last 11 years has been funding my desire to eat and drink my way through the United States. By combining my Restaurants category with Alcohol & Bars, we get:

Hey, we all need to eat. But probably not at a restaurant three times a week with drinks to follow. Once again, living my best, most expensive life in 2023. An all-time high by more than $2,000 for these combined categories, doubling what I used to spend gallivanting around town. The creep really began in 2018 before being stalled by COVID, only to regain momentum with reckless abandon. To further incriminate myself, roughly half of that spend is on booze alone. Now, I wouldn’t say that I have a drinking problem. But it’s safe to say I have a spending-money-on drinking problem. It pays to be sober in this economy.

Fun with Mint transaction history: The dreaded $5 latte

Next personal finance sin to repent: the much-maligned $5 latte. I used to not even drink coffee, and now it’s an entire spending category. You can see below exactly when I started to get a taste for the cocoa bean, which began as a noble enough post-pandemic pursuit:

A latte a day keeps retirement away. If you do the math, that’s actually closer to $6 a day. Somewhere, Dave Ramsey is turning over in his mansion.

Fun with Mint transaction history: Fast Food Nation

I’ve been focusing on the negative, so let’s celebrate a small win–both for my financial and physical health. Like any recent grad, I spent some years dining on the classier alternative to ramen: the fast food dollar menu. As you can see, those dollars can add up. Thankfully, fast food spending is one downward trend I can hang my hat on (excluding, once again, YOLO2023).

What kind of fast food, you ask? Of my $10,000 worth of fast food indulgence over the last 11 years, more than 20% was allocated to Chipotle! Take a look at the top 7 rankings:

Chipotle	$2,023.14
Subway	$940.30
Taco Bell	$704.67
Firehouse Subs	$335.53
Chick-Fil-A	$328.30
Quiznos	$258.78
McDonald’s	$227.49

Quiznos!?

Fun with Mint transaction history: Are you not entertained?

Here’s a fun one–at least, hopefully I had fun. My entertainment budget has stayed surprisingly steady, averaging about $2,300 per year:

My main forms of entertainment include anything from golf to one-off concerts or sporting events to monthly payments for cable, music and other streaming services. If anything, I might intentionally increase this budget. The main culprit here is fantasy football entry fees, though this spending line doesn’t account for any separately categorized income this hobby has produced–income which, to my surprise, exists!

Fun with Mint transaction history: Born a traveling man

OK let’s do one more–and another spending category that I wouldn’t mind seeing an increase in over the coming years. Similar to the “going out” budget, Covid is responsible for some accidental savings in the travel budget:

While it seems as if I haven’t regained my pre-Covid travel spend, the correct answer is likely that I’m simply spending smarter in this category thanks to my use of credit card rewards points.

Should I transfer my Mint data to Credit Karma?

Now that I’ve given a peak into my own spending habits, the question remains whether or not I’ll continue to track my spending in the same neurotic way outside of the friendly confines of the Mint app.

I’m not sure what the Venn diagram of existing Mint/Credit Karma users looks like, but I already count myself among them and am willing to give the new platform a try. Just as I’ve valued tracking my net worth on Mint, I’ve found it useful to track my credit score on Credit Karma over the years, albeit not as compulsively. Come to think of it, I also use Intuit’s TurboTax every year, so the whole Intuit product suite really has me by the financial balls.

While I’ve never been one to follow a strict budget anyway, the budgeting feature will, sadly, not be making the move to Credit Karma. I have used Mint as a tool to sketch out parameters for the routine spending categories, so I’ll need to seek an alternative app if I find the need to fill that loose budget void. Even without the budgeting feature and the transaction history limitations, there’s reason enough to give Credit Karma a fair shake as my new personal finance go-to.

What about my Net Worth?

If for nothing other than tracking your net worth, I’d encourage making the move to Credit Karma. Your complete net worth history, unlike your transactions, will make the move with you. If you don’t believe in Karma, I’d highly recommend using a similar financial housekeeping site like Empower (formerly known as Personal Capital–I really should just get an affiliate link for this like everyone else). Or hell, just use an Excel spreadsheet. For me, nothing beats the financial clarity provided by the visual of having all of my accounts in one place.

Just remember, as that number fluctuates: your net worth is not your self worth. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to keep track of.

Farwell, sweet prince

What I’ll miss most about storing the entire history of my financial life with Mint is being able to get really in the weeds on the costs associated with life’s ebbs and flows. Using Mint to create the simple bar graphs above has been an invaluable tool in better understanding the changes in my own spending habits over the last decade-plus.

I realize that this is all a little pathetic, mourning the loss of a budgeting website, but I’ve really grown up with Mint alongside me on my path to (eventual) financial freedom. It was there for me when I needed I tighter budget just as it has helped reign me in when I’ve had a little spare cash to spend (current year excluded).

Mint may be dead, but the financial habits that it helped ingrain in me will live on. Here’s hoping me and Credit Karma vibe like that.