Last week, I got an email from mint.com . I regularly get pesky emails from Mint telling me that I am over budget for something, usually groceries. For those of you not acquainted with Mint, it is a free budgeting website. It will do amazing things like import credit card accounts, student loan accounts, checking and savings accounts, car payments and any retirement or investment accounts. Basically a free online portfolio. I have been using it for about a year to track spending. I have assigned a certain amount of money for each area of spending and will get weekly spending emails as well as email alerts when something goes over budget.
I explain all this because last week I got an email from Mint telling me that I went overbudget for my cell phone. This is actually quite impossible since I make one payment and it is the same EVERY month. I went to Mint and it had miscategorized a transaction as a mobile phone when it was not. Oddly enough it was a $7.83 charge for an International transaction fee. To my knowledge, I hadn't made any international purchases, but I called David to confirm before I spoiled any Christmas surprises. A quick view over the Mint site as well as Wells Fargo, I found a $261 charge from Microsoft. I just got a tablet and David has Windows 7, so I was pretty sure this was a bogus charge. I made the calls and later learned that the card had been compromised through a website David played an online game with his brother. The card was cancelled and we're waiting on the new one.
The thing is, David had been mentioning that the account was looking a little lower than it ought, but I chocked it up to bills, etc. that I had just paid. Around Christmas everyone's accounts are a little low, I think. In any case, at no point would I have found th charg (from only four days previous) if Mint hadn't emailed me to tell me something was off. I very much appreciate those pesky emails this week!
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