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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

I use Mint but generally, am not trilled with it.

1. I have a hard time managing my bank account AND my main credit card. Mint seems to think me paying off my credit card bill is another expense, however Mint already tracked the CC charges so basically Mint thinks I run a massive loss every month (yes I've tried fixing this, multiple times)

2. Other than reviewing your newest transactions, and the occasional useful bill/fee reminder, I don't find much use for the app in regards to financial planning or analysis.

3. I don't like how Mint is basically used to slurp up my data, and sell me credit cards - it's obvious now how little they care about making it truly useful. The app has been in existence for years and barely nudges forward besides new UI.

The thought of manually tracking my expenses however is too much work. I find it hard enough launching the Mint app regularly to allow it to download my latest transactions.

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Manually tracking expenses seems harder than it actually is. For example, I just collect all the receipts for 3-4 days, and then spend 5 minutes to enter them in batch.

All the recurring transactions are planned once, and then you just confirm them with the real amount.

Basically, we're talking about 15–20 minutes per week for increasing your awareness about money and to keep your financial life under control.

This is work, nobody will do it for you. You just need to decide if it's worth it to you personally or not.

Check out You Need A Budget.

YNAB is great except when tracking existing credit card debt and new debt. I found it a real pain to figure out what my monthly payments should be. It's doable, I just found it not straight forward at all. That and trying to figure out what a 'month' is - different payments coming in at different times for purchases from different times, I kept finding myself trying to override and do manual catch ups. I finally just stopped using it.

Seconded. You Need A Budget uses envelope style budgeting, and it's been great for me. Without even knowing it, I was using envelope budgeting with Simple.com but it was a pain in the ass. YNAB fit what I wanted to do nearly perfectly!

It’s a great app. Well worth $50/year.

$84/year for new customers, still worth it.

> 1. I have a hard time managing my bank account AND my main credit card. Mint seems to think me paying off my credit card bill is another expense, however Mint already tracked the CC charges so basically Mint thinks I run a massive loss every month (yes I've tried fixing this, multiple times)

Paying the credit card bill of $X from your bank account should be offset by the crediting of $X to your credit card.

Spend $100 on your credit card, Pay $100 to your credit card from bank, Credit card has +$100 credit

The only net spending here is the original $100. The line item of the $100 coming from your bank should not be counted as additional expense, since it should be offset by the line item credit on the credit card.

Fwiw, Mint seems to handle this fine for me.

I hear you, I'm sure it's solvable, yet I have spent at least a few sessions attempting to figure this out and Mint continues to tell me I'm "in the red" by several thousand dollars every month (when in fact I am not)

I'm not seeing the "credit" applied to my card, just the expenses. I thought that Mint was supposed to "ignore" CC bill payments - however something just still isn't right and it makes Mint almost completely useless to me.

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