How Do Mint Categories and Sub-Categories Work With Budgets?
Mint's Categories and Sub-Categories can be confusing if you aren't sure how they relate to one another. It's important you know the subtle distinctions so you can properly categorize your transactions and keep your budgets accurate and up to date.
Mint has three ways to categorize transactions:
Main Category – Created by Mint and cannot be changed or deleted. Any sub-category will live underneath a main category.
Example: Â "Fees & Charges" is a main category
Mint Sub-Category – Created by Mint that also cannot be changed or deleted and lives underneath a main category.
Example, "ATM Fee", "Bank Fee", and "Finance Charge" are sub-categories of "Fees & Charges"
Your Sub-Category – Created by you that can be added to or deleted from a main category. Your sub-categories are the only categories you can create and edit.
Example: A custom "Additional Fees" sub-category that you created is your own sub-category
A few things to note about how budgets and categories work together:
If you create a budget based on a main category, like "Fees & Charges", anything categorized as a sub-category of "Fees & Charges" will count toward the "Fees & Charges" budget. So, if you get charged a $3 ATM fee when you take out cash from an ATM and it's categorized as "ATM Fee", and your bank charges you a $6 monthly maintenance fee and it's categorized as "Bank Fee" ("ATM Fee" and "Bank Fee" are the two sub-categories of "Fees & Charges"), both will count toward the "Fees & Charges" budget. For a budget based on a sub-category like "ATM Fee" (which is under "Fees & Charges"), only transactions specifically classified as "ATM Fee" will count toward the "ATM Fee" budget. A finance charge from your investment account, categorized as "Finance Charge" (a different sub-category under "Fees & Charges"), will not count toward the "ATM Fee" budget, even though "Finance Charge" and "ATM Fee" are both sub-categories of "Fees & Charges". To help clarify, a budget defined by a sub-category will only include transactions that are listed under that specific sub-category. A budget defined by a main category will include all transactions listed as one of that main category’s sub-categories. Typically, you'll want to set up a budget using a main category like "Fees & Charges" which will roll any transactions categorized as "Fees & Charges" and any of its sub-categories into that one budget.
This helps keep your budgets simple.










