Need one-time income budgets

Edit Subject

This owuld help to cover bonuses. Today you have to make the change in the month that you are expecting the one-time inome.

Ditto. I have a somewhat predictable pattern that varies greatly month to month. Help!

Agree. One time income is very common. I don't understand why Mint cannot handle it...

Need to change the planning and budgeting process to reflect that people budget on a yearly, semi yearly or other time periods and not monthly. This is ridicules that you cannot set future budget months or change previous months. Who is MINT trying to protest?

This seems like a no brainer!

I am happy at solanole's idea. I am frustrated with Mint. Variable income budgeting is so simple and such a basic.

Please add this!

I'd love this for tax refunds and such!

Yes! Totally necessary!

Hello,

We are already looking into fixing the "every month" frequency defaulted for Income budget. And, hope to do that ASAP.

I'd also want to share a workaround accidentally discovered by one user. This might work and help you budget a one-time Income. Click here to go the topic reply.

As for the requested Variable Income Budgeting, our product team is keeping an eye on Idea topics such as this one and is continually taking your ideas into consideration.

We thank you for letting us hear your ideas and know how Mint.com can best serve you as our valued customers.

Have a great day!

I agree - very frustrating! I'm trying to allocate my health care reimbursement check to the budget, and can't. It will only allow me to make a change to my overall monthly expected income - which is not changing...

Send a letter to the founder of Mint.com and signatory of the email announcing shut down of QOL. Here's a copy of mine that you can copy-and-paste and use verbatim or spin into your own version:

[Date]
[Your Street Addres]
[Your City, State and Zip]

Aaron Patzer
Vice President of Intuit Personal Finance Group
Intuit Inc.
Customer Communications
2800 E. Commerce Center Place
Tucson, AZ 85706

Greetings Vice President Patzer,

I received your email communication dated July 16, 2010 and I am appalled.

For the past five months, the customer base that uses Quicken On-Line (QOL) has been loudly requesting that the functionality currently available in QOL to schedule and track one-time and recurring bills and deposits for purposes of managing cash flow be migrated to Mint. Your employees monitoring the Support Community for Mint.com powered by "Get Satisfaction!" have studiously ignored these requests or grossly misunderstood them up to this point.

The ability to enter a single transaction manually, a much touted “improvement” that is supposed to “solve” this problem, isn’t even a baseball, much less anything to be hit out of a ballpark. I’m seriously confused about Inuit’s decision-making and strategy with regard to QOL and Mint, and desperately would like to have the following questions answered:

1. Why is Mint replacing Quicken On-Line?

2. What is Mint's target market/demographic and what does Mint see as the current economy's most urgent requirement?

3. Will Mint be fully functional (i.e., retain all of the features of QOL while incorporating newer and better features), and if yes, when will full functionality be available, and if not, why not?

4. If Mint does not have all the functionality of QOL by August 29, 2010, how can Intuit in good conscience consider shutting down QOL before Mint is fully functional? Will Intuit consider delaying shut down of QOL until Mint is fully functional?

Other than improved GUI (graphical user interface) and a marketing suite of revenue-generating financial services (I know that free is never really free), Mint currently has less functionality than QOL. Furthermore, a topic entitled “Add Recurring Transactions” was marked “The company has not planned to implement this” either yesterday or today, just days after I joined the thread.

On the other hand, the “Will Mint do bill reminders” thread is marked “The company has this under consideration,” where the full suggestion reads, “Will Mint have a bill reminder feature that shows you when credit card, loan and other bills [emphasis added] are due? Ideally you could also manually add off-line accounts to keep track of as well.”

Now, if this isn’t exactly what “Adding Recurring Transactions” means, I know I’m going to hate finding out what Inuit thinks it means. If we can’t enter upcoming transactions for OTHER BILLS, such as water, phone, electricity, gas, alimony, child support, cable TV, lawn maintenance, mortgage, etc., all of which are fixed, recurring expenses and off-line accounts, then how can bill reminders be generated? Answer: They can’t!

I simply cannot understand why Mint does not already have this most crucial of basic money management features. MS Money Plus did this far better than QOL, but I’ve learned to live with QOL’s restriction of only being able to see the effects of my cash flow decisions one month into the future instead of an entire year. However, having no predictive capacity in Mint leaves me BLIND and that is UNACCEPTABLE. Does Inuit truly believe it is serving the needs of its customers by leaving out this vital functionality?

I urge you, Mr. Vice President, to reconsider any plans there may be to drop any of the functionality of QOL from Mint and to reconsider any plans to shut down QOL before migrating all the functionality of QOL to Mint. Any other considerations are simply economically suicidal and would result in more people abandoning Mint (who would otherwise be very delighted to use your new product) than are currently using it. While it appears a large number of people are using Mint happily, you may not be aware that a high percentage of people with accounts are not using them pending implementation of the functionality that is the subject of this letter.

Please try to hit one out of the park for the people who desperately need this tool. You have the bat, you have the ball; you just need to move them to your new park and start swinging.

With great hope and expectation

[Your Name]

Let's flood their office with paper, because paper still speaks in this country and they're not reading our electronic pleas for the past 5 months -- and just think how grateful the US Postal Service will be, since they're bemoaning the death of the regular mail and want to raise postage stamp prices.

Kat

This is still not possible?

No, it's not possible yet. It's really sad that it's taking so long to get this going.

Yes this would be awesome I just got a bonus I would like to make my budget work with it

Tell us Mint: are you going to do this or not? As everyone notes, it is ridiculous that it does not have this capability. Even more ridiculous is that fact that people have been writing here for month and have one response from an employee - pointing out that you'll think about it, and that, in fact, a user found an inadequate substitution. That is no longer ridiculous - it is embarrassing. Tell us if you plan to fix it!

I am a graduate student so one time income or reimbursements happen to me. I would like to see this feature supported.

me too! im a freelancer and income is not the same monthly.

To create a one-time income budget, I tried the following:
- when creating a new budget, first click on the "Once" radio.
- then choose the category (anything under Income). You'll see that the "Once" radio vanishes, and only the "Every Month" radio button remains.
- however, you'll also notice that the option to set when this income is expected shows up. (It lets you choose a certain month, and you can choose the current).
- Once you submit, it seems to work.

However, I don't know if it really works yet. (That is, next month, this budget should vanish, and I'd have to create another one).

And btw mint, why does it take so long to fix such a simple thing.

Nice tool btw.

My work shifts are 4 days (12 hours each) on 5 days off with a 2 week pay cycle so, like almost everyone here I have a variable pay schedule. I would be pleased if your creative team had some way of helping me plan for this variablity

thank you

Essential functionality. Unexpected one-time income must be able to be split up as deposits to several budget categories.

great idea - MINT! please give us the option to budget for income like we can expenses! Thanks.

I can't believe an employee replied to this idea six months ago and it still hasn't been fixed! It's so obvious that this should be an option and I don't understand why it should take so long to make it so. Arg!

I agree. This feature MUST be added. You have categories for bonuses already set up, but bonuses generally don't happen on a monthly basis. Fix, please!

Like many others, I don't understand why this isn't offered - and why it is taking so long. It seems to me that budgeting software is basically useless without this function.

I would not have signed up a couple of weeks ago if I'd know this option wasn't offered. It didn't even occur to me that it wouldn't be, since it's so incredibly fundamental.

Hey Mint. you have a bunch of other topics about one-time income budgets as "answered" however I feel those are KLUDGES not really a fix... You should keep the radio buttons visible when someone picks an income category. I get reimbursements as I'm sure many other people do, so once I submit my expense report and it gets approved, I'd like to mark that money as future income and include it in my budget.

Thanks!