mint is shutting down 😫

[Ferngully]

Monarch looks really nice! Not sure I have the stomach for switching right now (and would keep Tiller for spreadsheets regardless) but will have to poke around.

[galliver]

My one gripe with Monarch (which may actually be with Plaid? ) is it does a terrible job picking up new accounts at an already added bank (Mint did this implicitly).

Example: if you move some of your savings to a new CD, you have to reload all your accounts from that bank. This then messes up your tracking by treating all those balances as new funds/income.

[katrillion]

My favorite budgeting/financial tracking software, Mint, is shutting down at the end of 2023. I’m trying to view this as a positive thing, I think Intuit is kind of an evil company and I’m excited that I will be completely free of their products after Mint’s EOL. Also moving to a paid service without ads might be nice. But I’ll miss the mostly accurate automated categorization, and being able to easily see trends and spending categories over a specified period of time.

What are your favorite tracking tools and why?

[neovonretorch]

Hey welcome - there is a thread discussing alternatives you can check out!

mint is shutting down

I use Tiller for assets (but still use YNAB for expenses & budgeting, Tiller doesn’t have a mobile app and I like to reconcile from my phone). I really like how it auto-populates a spreadsheet, which means I can set up a template to show me the info I want.

Template after a few years of tweaking, numbers are fake

<a class="lightbox" href="//omdforum.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/3X/a/a/aa62eb827fde1895e9194afdc6141713be1cb5b0.png" data-download-href="/…

[katrillion]

Oh thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for

[letired]

I still use PC, and they were pretty aggressive for a while about calling me, but did eventually give up. It took a while though. It felt like the price I paid for a ‘free’ service, but i agree it was mega annoying.

[anomalily]

Hey hey looks like time to do a round 3 of the budgeting app games - if you’re going to try something out other than mint, might as well get stickers and a badge for it!

Budgeting App Judging Challenge - Try Things other than Mint, get stickers

The past two years, I put together a battle for all the many, many budgeting apps out there! Now with Mint shutting down, why not do it again so people can get some stickers while trying out a new app!? While I’ve tried a ton of them myself, I really want to get perspective from some of the folks in the OMD community try them, too. We put together the Summer of Funds Budgeting App-Lympics These are the videos that came from those [🔴 Live: Budgeting for People Who Hate Budgeting] […

[anomalily]

These are the apps in the review, for reference

App/Website	Type of App	Compatible OSes	Other Notes
NEW Much App	Budgeting, Goals	Web, iOS, Android	Free 30-day Trial, Costs after that
Mvelopes	Budgeting	Web, iOS, Android	Free 30-day Trial, Costs after that
Splitwise	Splitting expenses	Web, iOS, Android	Free
Tiller	Budgeting and Investing Dashboard	Web	30 Day Free Trial, Costs after that, free for students - Must have google account; Runs in Google Sheets
EMPOWER - WAS Personal Capital	Budgeting and Investing Dashboard	Web, iOS, Android	Free; must connect some bank accounts
Honeydue	Budgeting app for couples	iOS, Android	Only testing the free app (not the account) Must have 1 other person to test with
Pear Budget	Budgeting	Web	30 day free trial, costs after that
Toshl	Budgeting	Web, iOS, Android	30 day free trial, costs after that
PocketGuard	Budgeting	iOS, Android	Free version - Good for Overspenders
Simplifi	Budgeting	web, iOS, Android	30 day free trial, costs after that
YNAB	Budgeting	web, iOS, Android	34 day free trial, free for students, costs after that
Fudget	Simple Overview Budgeting	iOS, Android	$2.99, does not link to bank account
Monarch Money	Budgeting and Goals	Web, iOS, Android	Free plan with Premium Upgrade, Free trial, allows you to budget with a partner
GNUCash	Personal Double Entry Bookkeeping	Desktop - Linux, Windoze, Mac	Free and Open Source
NEW CreditKarma	Successor to mint but has no budgeting	Web, iOS, Android	Free
NEW Weekly	Budgeting	iOS only	Free on mobile, web costs money

[hollaynia]

We’ve had Personal Capital (now empower) and abandoned it because we had trouble loading some of our accounts.
I’m looking at it again and it doesn’t appear you can set budgets there either - am I missing something?

[letired]

It has something it calls a budget, but it’s just a total monthly spending goal, no specific category numbers. It does let you categorize each transaction, but it’s more retrospective/tracking than forward planning. I get more mileage out of their ‘cash flow’ view, but it’s still not a real budget.

Their target audience is definitely high income or high net worth people that dont care about budgeting or spending planning.

[anomalily]

Creditkarma just told me that my credit score “unlocked” their budgeting and net worth features

[madgeylou]

hmm i am 803 and it didn’t do that for me

[rocklobster]

With creditkarma are you switching over to them, or are they moving everyone from mint? I tried a free monarch money and they extended my trial to 30 days. I might stay with them - it looks like I should be able to import all my mint data.

[lhamo]

Apologies if somebody mentioned this already and I missed it. Followed a tip from a similar thread on the Other Place today and realized I have access to Fidelity’s Full View tool, which seems to work much like Mint but with (IMO) a cleaner, more streamlined interface. Adding accounts was pretty easy – even let me connect to my Treasury Direct account (once I found the long-forgotten password I set up ages ago).

Not sure if you have to have a certain level of account balances there or not, but Fidelity has some pretty robust tools including this one (I love their Retirement Income Planner or whatever they call it these days) so might be a good fit for those who already have accounts there or are considering opening some.

Oh, and the Full View interface is powered by their eMoney software, which is what a lot of financial planners use. I was going to sign up for PlanVision to get access to it, but I guess maybe I already have it through this and the retirement planner?

[galliver]

@anomalily should this be added to the reviews?

[rocklobster]

I’m liking Monarch as a mint substitute so far and I don’t mind paying for it. $100 for the year seems reasonable, and they are allowing me to import all my data from Mint. It seems less glitchy and problematic already and I got a real response from a person when I emailed customer service. I will probably stay with them. I do wish it updated my pending transactions into the balance, but that’s a small complaint.

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[kenner]

I’ll fill out the google sheets later if that’s helpful (@anomalily, is it?), but a quick update on my testing of some various Mint replacements.

General info:
• Primary checking account: USBank
• Primary investment account: Fidelity, although I don’t use budgeting apps for investment advice so this is mostly important because it’s also where I have my catch-all 2% card
• Local credit union for mortgage
• Credit cards from some of the major vendors (Chase, American Express, etc.) plus a couple smaller banks/credit unions for specific purposes
• Paypal account for charitable giving

I used Mint primarily for transaction tracking purposes since being able to see all of them at once is much easier than going through each statement individually, as well as for categorization with the totals per category getting moved to my own spreadsheet at he end of each month. Also really liked the ‘bills’ view where I could see all of the upcoming charges coming out of my checking account. I set up budgets but didn’t track them particularly stringently, and as noted previously didn’t have much use for the investment advice (or the net worth tracking since I do that elsewhere), but it was also there.

Personal Capital/Empower: Chickened out on reengaging with this one…I initially tried both it and Mint at the same time and did not appreciate the repeated phone calls from them insisting that I needed to use their investment advisors/services, especially since they didn’t knock it off when I told them I wasn’t interested. A couple people at the other place have said that it’s gotten better since it became Empower, but a couple still seem to be having the same issues, and I’m not up for dealing with that right now.

CreditKarma: Haven’t gotten the option to switch yet so not sure how this stacks up, but also not thrilled at what I’ve heard about CK’s greater data harvesting (transaction info I don’t care about, especially since it’s aggregated anyway, investment and banking info is a little more questionable).

Fidelity FullView: Free (at least with account) and the first thing I tried. Most everything sync’d without problems with the exception of one of the smaller credit unions and Paypal, and since they didn’t have the ability to add transactions manually I wasn’t entirely thrilled. It seemed usable, though, especially since they did include things like being able to add your own categories for transactions and set up rules to organize them. They were also advertising a big update coming shortly when I started setting things up so I was hoping they’d fix the no-manual-transactions problem along with a few other oddities like defaulting to a rolling 30-day window rather than monthly tracking and not having anywhere that tracked recurring transactions. Unfortunately about the only thing their update did fix was the 30-day window thing, and on the downside it completely blew away the categories and rules I’d set up and did pretty bad things with transactions in general. They reverted very quickly with the note that they appreciated the feedback (I suspect they got a lot of WTF), but given that little mess I’d call this is a beta that I’ll probably keep an eye on but I don’t think they’re there for what I need it for yet.

Monarch: 30 day free trial, otherwise $100/yr ($50 first year with MINT50 discount code). Got everything to sync without problems although I had to play around a little for both USBank and Fidelity which didn’t thrill me. My mortgage account also can’t seem to decide if it wants to stay connected, but I think that has to do with the authentication setup, and since it’s obviously a known recurring transaction it’s not a major issue. The categorization seems fairly good and it offers the options to set up rules as well, but the transaction layout is a little underwhelming since the basic view shows only merchant, classification, and $$, and I’d like to be able to see which account is involved without having to open the ‘detail’ view for each one. There’s a Cash Flow tab that generates a monthly report that looks good for what I need, although with regards to bills I haven’t been able to get a lot out of the Recurring tab. That might just be because I haven’t been using it for a full month, though, so it hasn’t gotten a lot of input to determine what is/is not recurring (I did try importing from Mint, but especially with custom categories a lot of stuff didn’t come through very cleanly). Best assessment thus far is that this would probably do what I want, but with only a 30 day free trial to figure everything out I’m still kind of meh…I could do another couple months at the month-to-month price to see if it really does what I want prior to locking in for a year, but I like the next option better.

Simplifi: 90 day free trial, $48/yr ($0 first year if importing data from Mint, and I can say I tried this with one set of transactions from a little-used card and it immediately updated my renewal date). This one didn’t sync with one of my smaller credit union cards (PenFed) but I was able to pull in everything else, and customer support actually responded when I asked about known issues and told me how to escalate which I appreciate. Similar to Monarch with regards to ability to create and organize categories and set up rules for transactions…the gui view is quite a bit busier, but I’m on a computer screen which makes that not a big deal, and the Transactions tab does include account information along with the other details which I find helpful. Also the Reports tab summarizes nicely by month. It has a Bills tab as well, but like Monarch’s Recurring tab I haven’t been able to get much use out of it yet…for example it seems to classify more than two purchases from the same merchant as a recurring bill which is mostly not how I consider groceries to work. Again hoping this is a training/dataset issue (to import from Mint here you have to go account-by-account and I probably won’t bother with most of them). This is probably the app I’m going to go with since at first glance it seems to meet all of my basic requirements and there’s a much longer trial period to find any showstoppers…even 90 days is much better than the single month since it gives me a bigger dataset transaction-wise and more time to play around with what it can really do month-over-month.

[noodle]

Thank you! My main bank is also USBank. This is v useful.

[madgeylou]

i decided to go with monarch + ynab. monarch is basically just for tracking and monitoring my cashflow. ynab is where the doling out of dollars happens. someone should make an app that does both!

[galliver]

@kenner

for example it seems to classify more than two purchases from the same merchant as a recurring bill which is mostly not how I consider groceries to work

ROFL what SW Engineer thought this was a good idea!?