Thursday, October 30, 2014

Hazards of Trusting Software

Brianna and I use Mint.com to track our finances – it’s a great tool for when you have more than just a single checking and savings account. One of the budgets we track using Mint is the house budget – what I draw from for paint, tools, and IKEA as-is products. This month the budget seemed particularly tight, though.

Looking through it, I found a large purchase at Home Depot (which automatically falls under the “house” budget) that I couldn't remember. It took some back-and-forth with Brianna and some close reading of some computer-generated text, but I realized the transfer from our checking account to the Home Depot Credit Card (to pay off the card) was being counted as an expense, rather than a transfer. Effectively, anything purchased on the Home Depot Credit Card was being deducted from the House spending allowance twice!

Ultimately, it was a fairly easy problem to fix – much better than an actual fraudulent charge!

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