Insights from Mint.com

Going over my Mint.com trends for the past couple years, I noticed a few things I thought were somewhat cool. In no particular order:

• 75% of my out-of-pocket expenses are for housing and communications - mortgage, property taxes, insurance, and all utilities including TV, Internet, and phone.
• I spend more for Verizon Wireless than I spend at Walmart. To be fair, my Verizon bill covers five people. To be unfair, Walmart covers the majority of my grocery expenses and cat food and litter. To be fair again, I eat out quite a bit, so groceries are cheap.
• I will also spend more for Verizon Wireless than I spend on eating out, once figures include a full 24 months of Verizon bills.
• I spend a lot at Chili's ($800), and it is probably worth getting any discounted gift cards I see.
• My expenses have actually gone up since I've started paying attention to them. Every month, I've spent more in 2010 than 2009. I've also had more cash on hand.
• It's very important to set up renaming rules right when the name of a merchant changes for whatever reason. From that point on, it becomes automatic.
• Rollover budgets are great in theory, but end up making the overall totals meaningless as they drift way negative or way over budget. Really, the budget feature itself is not as informative as the Trends tab.
• "In the past 30 days, you spent $309.62 on Clothing. Usually you spend $9." That $9/month is inflated because it includes a tuxedo rental and a bunch of clothes that weren't actually mine. In other words, I spend very little on clothes.
• It is also important to realize tax refunds are income that the government held for you, and not taxes. Assigning tax refunds to the 'Taxes' category can result in negative spending for the month, which looks awkward.

Get 10% off at Home Depot: Part II

I don't think I need to feel bad about gaming the system, or anything like that, when I bought a gift card for bonus rewards. So far, I've used my gift card twice and still have $30.64 left. I'm assuming that gift cards are accounted for in-house, so my small purchases with the gift card will save Home Depot a bit of money on the credit card transaction fees. There was the initial transaction fee when I bought the card, but after that each purchase should save them $0.25 or so.

More than that, having the gift card in my wallet encourages me to shop at Home Depot for things I might not normally go there for. The more you bring someone in, the more likely they are to buy something they didn't really want.... Even more important, this has gotten me to write two whole posts on this now, so I've advertised for them to... what, two or three people? ;)

Also, in addition to Chase's Rewards Plus program, Bank of America has their Add It Up program. It seems to offer similar deals on the big stores, but has its own collection of smaller merchants. One that was heavily featured when I just now looked at it was 50% off match.com. I'm sure the fine print makes it hard to use, but that's definitely not available through Chase. Check your banking institution or credit card supplier, and let me know if you find any good deals!

Get 10% off at Home Depot!

Thanks to an email from Chase advertising their Rewards Plus program, coupled with several recent trips to Home Depot making their logo catch my eye, I clicked through and looked at the extra rewards for HomeDepot.com. At the time, they were offering 10% bonus rewards! It has since dropped to 5%, but that's still better than nothing, for sure. What makes this special is that their offer includes the following: "Eligible on the purchase of gift cards." Most merchants include the word "Not" at the beginning, and so I was fearing it was a typo.

Honestly, I don't think that I'd ever shop at HomeDepot.com. I think I'll always want to see the hardware-type products first. However, I'm happy to buy gift cards online - especially the kind you can print off yourself! So, I went ahead and bought a $50 gift card to see if it actually worked. Today, I got the notification that I earned $5 in bonus rewards! Gift cards work just like cash, so this is in addition to any other sales or coupons you take advantage of. Not too shabby.

I'll be keeping my eye out for other merchants that offer bonus rewards on gift cards. In fact, the Chase Rewards Plus site has a link at the top called "Gift Cards." It's not clear if this list is 100% accurate or exhaustive. Nothing else really stood out to me, either. Ah well!