User's bin path not recognised in login script

[Russell Gadd]

The bash login script I have added in to my startup programs does not 
recognise /home/user/bin as part of the path, whereas it used to when I 
was running Linux Mint (I'm a recent refugee). I've got 
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" in ~/.bashrc and also in ~/.profile, together 
with a ~/.bash_profile which sources ~/.profile. I've no idea whether 
all these are necessary - they do work to search my bin in a script run 
in the Mate terminal but not in the login script. It's not a big deal as 
I can prepend the absolute path in the login script, although I assume 
this means also doing it in sourced scripts within the login script, so 
I'd like to know if there's a clean way to set this up.