Four Ways Mint Can Make Your Tax Season Easier

Tim Murphy for Lifehacker writes: Last year 110 million Americans got a tax refund and the average amount was about $2,800. That's a lot of money—so why do we still love to hate tax season? Because the added paperwork, deciphering IRS definitions, and ever-changing laws make our tax returns tougher every year. But with the right tool, you can save time and skip some of the anxiety. Lifehacker readers' favorite mobile finance app Mint is great for basic organization, but there's a lot more you can do with it.  I wrote an entire book about getting more out of Mint everyday, and here are a few tips to make your tax season easier.

Tags

A sadly underutilized tool within Mint is a concept you're probably familiar with—tags. Just like in Evernote or Wordpress, tags are a way to group similar items that exist in different categories. This is particularly useful during tax time, when you might have several tax-deductible expenses that all occur in different categories (like Home or Health and Fitness).

For example, if you bought a high efficiency appliance last year, you'd categorize that as a Home Improvement expense. But you want to make sure you get the tax credit reinstated in the "Fiscal Cliff" bill, so you'd tag it as Tax Related. That way it's still in the Home category where it belongs, but it's easily grouped with other Tax Related transactions throughout the year.

Why not just create a category called Tax Related, you ask? Because budgets pull data from categories, not tags. So removing that appliance purchase from your Home category would screw up your Home budget. Coherent categories are the key to successful budgeting in Mint, so the last thing you want to do is mess around with your categories. Tags offer an easy and effective alternative.

Creating tags is easy—just bring up any transaction on Mint.com, and click the "Edit Details" tab. In the box that pops up, click on the "Edit Tags" button and you can create a new tag on the next page. Simple as that.

Save In Case You Owe

Part of why so many of us delay filing our taxes is because we're worried we'll owe money in the end. If you earned more in 2012 than in 2011, or if you profited from selling an investment or business, you could owe the IRS money in April. How much will depend on a number of factors, but a tax estimator or IRS withholding calculator are useful for getting a rough idea.

If you're going to owe money the following April, set up a savings goal right away. That way when tax time rolls around, it won't be a shock to your system if you owe a few hundred or thousand dollars. To set up a tax season savings goal, head to the Mint website and click Goals > Add a Goal > Create a Custom Goal. Name your goal "2012 Tax Payment," choose the Bills and Taxes category and set the total amount you want to save. Follow the steps to link the goal to your savings account (or open a new one), set a date before April 15, 2013, and hit Save.

The final step is to automatically send money from your checking to your savings account, and Mint will adjust your goal as money gets deposited into that savings account.

Export as .CSV

Another well-kept secret about Mint is that your data doesn't have to stay there. You can easily download it (all or in segments) as a .CSV file to read or share as a spreadsheet. When would you need to do this?

Well, the tags example above is a good place to start. Let's say your company wants a list of all your reimbursable expenses for the month (or year). If you've tagged them as Reimbursable, you'll be able to download all of them as a .CSV and send that to your employer—all in about 10 seconds.

Just go to Transactions and scroll down to the Tags section, which is on the left side underneath Accounts. Click Reimbursable and Mint will pull up all the transactions with that tag. Click the tiny link that says, "Export all # transactions" at the bottom and that's it. Now you have an easily readable and shareable spreadsheet of your expenses, complete with transaction dates and details. One more reason to use tags!

Put Your Financial Life Into Perspective

The Trends section is another valuable tool during tax time, providing a breakdown of expenses, income, net income, assets, debts, and net worth. It also allows you to search by category and see transactions by day, week, month, or year. This information is really handy during tax time when you might have to answer questions like, "Did you make any charitable donations last year?" or "Did you incur any expenses while looking for a job?"

To see a list of your total charitable donations, for example, go to the Trends section and view by Spending Over Time. In the text box, start typing Charity (or whatever category you're searching) and select it from the dropdown list that appears. Scroll down and you'll see your totals for the year, which you can add to your tax forms (or easily export as a .CSV file). You can also search by tags or merchant name to get a quick look at your spending history.

Filing your taxes might seem intimidating, but it really doesn't have to be. Leverage free tools like Mint and get organized. As you become more of a Mint pro, you'll be able to tweak and fine-tune your strategy until tax time is just a walk in the park. Good luck!

Editor's Note: Lifehacker readers get 25% off Tim's e-book, The Mint Manual: A short-cut to mastering and saving money with Mint.com. Just enter code "LHMint25" at checkout.