I kind of hate Mint.com. For those not in the know, Mint is a personal finance management website that logs into all your bank accounts and credit card accounts automatically and obtains current financial info for you to help you manage your budget. However, the catch is that Mint can’t track anything you didn’t buy with plastic.
Thus, Mint incentivizes you to make all your purchase with a credit card, thereby leeching 2-5% of each transaction (depending on the fee structure of the retailer) out of the fledgling businesses that you go out of your way to support because they are helping revitalize your community and make your life better. Then pay this “convenience tax” to a predatory company that will not only sell your spending habits to marketing companies and drown you in television, radio and print marketing every day of your life, but will also ultimately steal from you with so many surpising fees and usurious interest rates that you won’t know whether to puke or sob. K, now that you’re doing that, we will help you look at where you spent your money over the past few months!
I hope that Mint is getting hefty marketing payments from Visa and Mastercard, because they sure are doing plenty of legwork for them. Of course, the appeal of being able to micromanage your finances down to the last penny without having to carry around a grocery bag full of receipts is appealing, in a neurotic sort of way, or an erotic sort of way if you buy a lot of porn. Yet I beseech you, dear reader,* resist the temptation to categorize your expenditures as methodically as your anachronistic collection of hummels. Free yourself by spending only cold, hard, veiny cash.
Cash has all sorts of things going for it. First, you don’t have to remember that you spent it, because you don’t have to pay for it at the end of the month. Its like the ultimate real-time payment system! Cash is fucking instantaneous, man!
Second, cash works at cash only businesses. You know the type of businesses that don’t accept credit cards? The ones with horrendously overpriced ATMs waiting to skim your pin number and steal from you in small increments at random intervals over the next few months? Sure, you could cut them a check, but you* and I both know that you’re not a 76 year old woman standing in the express lane of a supermarket with a stack of coupons and a checkbook. Don’t be a loser. Don’t do drugs. Don’t use checks.
Finally, the best reason to use cash is this: you can get rid of your credit cards. Do you know what it feels like to peel back the fingers of that hairy, stinky, credit-card monkey on your back, one by one, until the fetid beast falls from your shoulder’s like a gangsta rap status symbol with a broken clasp? It feels really fucking good. Like, mixed metaphors good. Like, those yoplait ads where women pretend that eating yogurt makes them feel sexy crossed with those herbal essences ads where women with incompetent lovers have orgasms because of the excessively fruity-smelling chemical compounds in their conditioner.
Give it a try. You’ll be doing all the businesses you shop at a favor, and you won’t have to be afraid of the end of the month. Worst case scenario, you end up having to bail yourself out by putting some stuff on your card at the end of the month. Which is what you were going to do anyway, right? We know eachother so well.
Say “Hi” to your mother for me.
*I should probably just admit that I know who you are and call you by your first name, but the rant wouldn’t flow as well.
