What happened to Mint?
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products.
This also explains a lot of the problems with the internet at large today—misaligned business models. I'd definitely encourage anyone joining (or starting) a company to think about what the revenue model they are choosing means for the product and company long-term. Every company will say they are different, and that they actually care about their users and about building a good product... and maybe in the early days, the original team can stay true to that, but eventually time and money take their toll.
Companies that really want to build lovable, user-aligned products, set up a revenue model that encourages them to stick to that long term.
[1] https://www.monarchmoney.com [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
If I recall correctly, the original pitch deck for Mint stated that this was the plan. Weird to say it morphed into something that was just the original vision.
Edit: found the deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-de...
Source: was attending Berkeley with the people listed on the first slide when this was published.
The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the visualizations are not configurable at all, so if you want something that looks a bit different, or doesn't use a pie chart, or shows more things at once, you just can't do it. And it's all in Flash! I ended up building a crappy set of graphs in Excel and using Mint's csv output to try and get a more useful view of the data.
I think they moved away from Flash, I see svg now for charts
What was refreshing and different about Mint for me is that they said, "Hey, what if we really look at how people deal with their money and design accordingly?" It was a huge, innovative leap forward. It was far from perfect, but if they just kept iterating with the same spirit, I knew it would get to be something I loved. Alas, alas.
But if it's not a modern way to look at finances....
I see a lot of times, people export to Excel to do their own analysis. I think there is something about doing it "my way" that helps me connect with the data, whether it's budgeting or (my current project) fantasy sports.
Specifically, what value do you get from exporting and creating your own graphs? How much time do you spend / how frustrating is it to have to export and build the graphs?
One day I will throw it into an instance of http://redash.io and have more fluent access to the data, since I write SQL-backed graphs in my actual job I'm much better with it than Excel.
Couple questions, if you don't mind taking the time:
1) What makes you want to use Redash, instead of a spreadsheet?
2) If you had a service that (securely) sync'd data into your spreadsheet, would that provide all of the value of Redashing it?
The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Plaid's been around just as long.
But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
- Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over".
- You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...).
- No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time.
The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.
You can receive income in January, then switch to February and allocate it to a category. When you switch back to January, it will not show that money in your To Be Budgeted total. So you can zero out January while having the next month already budgeted for.
My system is to switch to the next month, select all categories, then click the "Budgeted Last Month" button to automatically apply my previous budget to that month. Then I switch back to the current month and fix any underfunded categories and allocate any overflows to get the balance down to zero.
YNAB seems to pretty actively want you to "Fresh Start." One of the giant values for me with Mint is historical information. I often will dump a CSV or troll through old transactions since I can't remember which account was used. After not touching Mint for a year I could go through and touch up categories and answer if "eating out" was something I'm doing more of in Nov/Dec than January. Or I could skim through and mark deductions when filing taxes or looking for medical expenses.
My needs have changed a lot since I was clawing out of debt. I don't really see myself setting a budget, but more tracking categories to find outliers. I guess kind of like changing my diet instead of trying to make my next meal "healthy."
That said, I'd love to ditch Mint. There are so many ads garbaging up the interface. I never found their charts all that useful. Their offers seem to be whoever bought ad space this month instead of what would improve my financial situation. YNAB is way better at things like bi-montly bills that use income split up each month.
I love being able to instantly graph net cash flow over the last 10 years.
I started doing this a while ago because Mint only tracks the maximum account value for a particular month and doesn't let you modify historical data. So once or twice a year, something with an account would change and I'd end up with a month with a 70% or something jump in net worth which would drop off the next month.
Plus, you can do projections with excel.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...
I run all of my spending through BoA credit cards / checking accounts, and they automatically categorize 99% of transactions and there's a nice little report of the last 12 months. It also incorporates Merrill data, and you can add other companies' logins to so BoA can import those transactions too, but I'm not a fan of giving out login information.
[0] https://www.moneydashboard.com/ [0.1] affiliate: https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ
I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market.
For example, task management software sounds like a coherent thing. But in practice, people think and work so differently that there will never be a solution that everybody loves. At least from personal experience, personal finance is the same way.
That's been an important insight for me to understand. Describing something in terms of its features/how it works, you might say "photo sharing app". But this core feature could be wrapped, packaged, marketed, and described so many different ways: flickr, Instagram, Getty Images (!!), a scientific collaboration tool, etc.
"Task management" feels similar.
With the caveat that this problem often persists even within the eyes of the customer. A lot of people would agree with the problem statement of, "I need something to help me keep track of what I have to do." But "I", "keep track of" and "what I have to do" varies widely in ways that the customer isn't aware of.
It's sort of like picking a place for a group of people to have dinner. A lot of people think they just want dinner until you say, "How about X" and then they realize their desires are much more specific.
You Need a Budget (YNAB) is proof of this. I don't believe they've taken any VC funding and are a pretty successful lifestyle business in the Budgeting/Finance space.
It’s also an expensive product for most people. But we do need more of these sustainable low-growth non-VC style SaaS companies out there.
Also, there is a plugin that gives you more reports: https://www.toolkitforynab.com/
Somewhere in between $very_long_ago and $long_ago, I stopped using a well-known personal finance app because I grew dissatisfied with it overall. It gained all sorts of genuinely useful capabilities over that time period, and didn't shed any, but still managed to become less functional (for my purposes) at the same time. I ended up replacing it with a competitor whose feature list was much, much, much smaller.
"A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle."
Seems like a useful concept. What's wrong with it?
When used it's a description that the business owners provide based on how they run their business, then it's OK. When you use it to describe someone else's business it's often considered a slur (unless they've previously shared this with you and you know that fact.)
Many smaller companies are not actually lifestyle businesses although that term is thrown around here. The owners may be part-time because they actually operate a group of companies, grow niche companies to sell outside of the VC world, etc. They are indistinguishable from lifestyle businesses, but the owners are looking to do a lot more than sustain a level of income.
I see.
I find it a bit unsettling that in some cultures stating that a business has priorities other than profit at all costs is considered a slur.
It is literally "Middle Class"
They want to stop at the 'M' part in SME.
A company whose owners are working to grow the business consistently and organically is not a lifestyle business; it is also not pursuing "profit at all costs". Most privately-held businesses fall into this category.
As to "lifestyle business" being a slur, it is unfortunate that members of the growth-obsessed communities use it as such. They don't see a business with a fixed target size as serious. Incidentally, many also think the same about the organic growth case I mentioned. I ignore them, and most other things from VC startup culture.
I find it interesting and even inspiring that some economies allow entrepreneurs to make this kind of choice. That is not my reality at all. In South-America, we grab every chance we get and don't let go. There is much less opportunity.
I think this is too far narrow a definition of "lifestyle business". The better definition is simply a business that fits the founder's intent and lifestyle.
I know several founders that started from nothing, built their company to turn a sizable profit and resisted big VC money.
It's demeaning and inaccurate to call them "lifestyle businesses", they made a calculated decision. Roughly, they took a chance with self-financing, and maybe a ~40% chance bet on making a good living, versus taking the VC money and having 3% on becoming unbelievably wealthy.
Given a 40% chance of making several million and a 3% chance of making billions, it's pretty reasonable for folks to take the higher probability, even if the statistical expected value is better with the VCs. These aren't people who "gave up", often, they made the smarter decisions.
To give an analogy: “family car” is a good way of describing a safe car that fits a lot of passengers. But if you set up your SUV for rock-crawling and somebody calls it “a nice family car” you might consider it a slur.
Which lumps a business that employs 140 people in several states and makes a few hundred thousand in profit every year with a bookstore with a cat that barely breaks even, and is closed every Wednesday so the owner can go skiing.
What it is not is a good term for any business that doesn't take VC. There are many businesses where the primary objective is to grow and make lots of money but where VC doesn't make sense. It's probably most businesses. So when someone calls a business a lifestyle business simply on the basis that the market isn't big enough to warrant VC, it's insulting to a large swath of business owners and generally a case of unwarranted elitism. Like if Zuckerberg was looking at businesses earning tens or hundreds of millions a year and went "how cute, lifestylers" it'd be shitty but at least he'd have the success to back it up. Mostly on here you see it from people just leaching off the success of their industry. They earn hundreds of thousands but use their position in tech to look down on people pulling in millions.
At that point you will have achieved significant scale and all the headaches that come with it.
Getting back to the above post, a budgeting tool is a lifestyle business. It will likely never grow to 100m+ revenue or 200+ employees.
It can however make for a great lifestyle business that generates enough money to cover living costs with minimal investment from the owners (after initial investment of building the business).
This just proves how stupid the label is.
Sure.
But that's always going to be true because VCs don't invest in lifestyle business.
Fuckin' ay. Consider me one of those consumers! ...I should probably stop consuming.
I think that depends on how you address the market, actually. The Mint way, which requires continuous engagement and ad impressions, is something you’d be right about. But there’s a larger addressable market of people who intermittently think about getting their finances squared away, maybe as a New Years resolution or something. If you market to those people the way gyms do, there might be a larger market.
2. Are their any features for Pro consumers who are not looking for budgeting or retirement planning? I don’t mind paying $100 a year for a good service. I would rather not have it free.
3. I am ready to switch banks or even brokerage firms if they provide a saner integration with your service
1. We are primarily using Plaid, but will support multiple data aggregators to provide our users with the best coverage for their financial institutions.
2. Yes. We will go way beyond what current products do. I can't go into specifics ahead of our launch, but we are confident we can help people achieve better financial outcomes cheaper and faster.
Our view is that a subscription-based model allows us to align our incentives with our users and focus on building the best product, rather than trying to optimize for advertising partners or data sales. On the latter point, we highly value privacy and will not share nor sell your financial data.
3. That's great to hear!
When are you going to have a beta out?
Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just curious.
(Val made his way into the post when another ex-Mint dev tweeted his apologies for what had become of the site; I got in touch with him and he suggested I talk to Val.)
> We use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to gather End User data from financial institutions. By using our service, you grant Monarch and Plaid the right, power, and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from the relevant financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored, and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid Privacy Policy.
1. Don’t be evil (aka don’t be intuit)
2. Web based with some sane security (2fa, encryption at rest, etc)
3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank.
4. Budgeting/reporting.
5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it?
6. Sane APIs.
No one I’ve been able to find has been able to do all 6 of these.
Forecasting is one of the strongest aspects of our product. We also provide alerts ahead of time if we can predict your account balance will fall below zero (or whatever threshold you configure). Forecasting can also be used to preview your expenses/income/cashflow for the upcoming months / years.
We do have an API, but I admit it's not the best around. Other than that, our product does all the 6 things you point out.
Happy to hear more feedback at shashank@buxfer.com
Why don't you link to it from your home page? I had to do a Google site search to find it. (And maybe even put the 'what we share' chart somewhere more prominent)
> 5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it?
I work on a methodology engine and have implemented both of these, at least on the data side, and they are essentially aspects of the same thing.
Fundamentally, what's hard is user trust. If they see numbers that don't make sense, explaining that "technically you told us this and this which all adds up to that" sounds like "we can't do arithemtic" to users.
The budget needs to agree with the forecasts. And the forecast doesn't quite semantically "fit" the budget; your forecast shouldn't "know" about the future or it can't give faithful metrics whereas your budget is supposed to plan ahead.
It also gets tricky when people use the damned thing, because your system needs to be resilient to users not doing the things they promised to do. For example, if they promise to deposit $500 in projected account A, but instead deposit it in tracked account B, you would project that the money lands in A, and also report that there's $500 more in B. So now those totals are off.
And budgeting itself is a surprisingly tricky problem. There are so many techniques to make a budget work that selecting good ones is hard. And users will say, "oh, I always want to spend $500 on this," and when that results in something stupid, "well, obviously not then." Even without that, it's hard to make the budget not do weird stuff that gives a user a WTF moment. The most counter-intuitive stuff tends to happen when the person is running low on funds, but that's also the raison d'etre of a budget.
> 3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank.
> 6. Sane APIs.
Between not making money off the APIs, having the user get frustrated being bounced between my support and the competitor, and that the APIs become another component that must be secured and administered, I'm not surprised APIs are uncommon.
Which makes me sad.
Question about MonarchMoney. Is it going to be a cloud service or a standalone old-fashion desktop software? Most of serious personal finance people would prefer desktop software in order to protect their own data. However, most consumers prefer a free and hosted solution. Which market is MonarchMoney going after?
1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead. I dropped Mint in favor of Quicken because no other tool allows me to properly plan ahead. But Quicken still lacks support for a number of financial institutions as well as stock options.
2. Please support stock options and non-public wealth tracking. Quicken has to be shoehorned into it, Personal Finance supports it but doesn’t allow you to plan ahead. You could do a lot here for people.
3. Have it be cross-platform. I wish I could edit Quicken transactions on my phone but I get this dumbed down synced version that is practically useless.
Put those three in and I’ll be one happy user.
This is such a no brainer. I tend to buy tickets to concerts/shows at times two months of time and I want to reflect that in that month's spending and not this months.
Just click on the transaction and then again on the date and modify.
The "KLO-ification" of Mint, the C1Acquisition of Level, Visa tactically grabbing Plaid: they're all to consolidate the industry and allow existing players to stifle the American banking landscape.
Tangent:
Twice, I've had coworkers - developers, mind you - tell me in a meeting with the whole team that "We're not going to turn away money." Both times I was left speechless, and silently judging like mad.
Because if you really dig into what a statement like that says about their character, you're going to be very, very disappointed, possibly lose respect for them, and once you have no respect the temptation to say something unpleasant is much higher.
Which is not to say, "I'm surrounded by scoundrels." There's something systemic there. When we have to repeat back what we've said or how we've behaved it's often a lot easier to see that we're disappointed in ourselves. That this is not the person you want to be. You know someone who has done this to you, or rather, for you. You might even hate it a little bit at first but they've done you a huge favor. Eventually you see it.
Problem is, there's no incentive or even huge disincentives to try to do things like this in a business setting. I'm sure this has been playing out in slow motion at Google, if only for statistical reasons. It seems to happen most places.
There are a lot of apps out there doing pretty much same thing as mint - can you give us a preview of how your app will be different?
I hope the next generation of personal finance apps maintain strict privacy guarantees while running on a subscription model. I'll definitely be giving Monarch a look!
How does it differ from YNAB (of which I am a big fan), for example? At first glance YNAB has all the same features shown on your website, and the "budget with ease" screenshot in particular could have been taken right from YNAB.
And what exactly does "The first all-in-one personal finance platform" mean? What does it have that others don't?
Hope this doesn't come off as overly critical! I am really interested.
At a high level, though, if you read the complaints in the rest of this thread you'd get a pretty good sense of what a product in this space would need to do to be successful (of course).
YNAB is great as a budgeting tool if you're willing to subscribe to their entire budgeting system, which most people aren't.
I haven't been able to find any other confirmation that this was a thing outside the one time I saw it.
I'd rather use Excel than be forced to use their stupid system.
The last thing I want to associate with my google account is my financial data.
I finally feel like I have a solid handle on my budget, Mint never gave that to me.
I seem to respond well to defined, rigid systems. I handle all my task management via the systems outlined in Getting Things Done. I'd be curious what other books are out there for handling aspects of life with a systemic, opinionated approach (professional life, social life, dating, etc.)?
Then, as the month goes on and some of the categories that didn't have a fixed budget are "over budget", I just move the required money to the individual category to zero it out. Anything that caries over to the next month goes to the savings category.
It is still early days for the product, bur it is rapidly improving and the creator is very good and communicate. The couple of times I have requested support (mostly for feature suggestions), she has gotten back to me very quickly.
The best part for me is how it handles where money you earn goes, it always goes to next month, not the current month (granted, after I graduated college it took me a bit to actually get back into this because of living with effectively 0 income for 4 years), so you know that you're already budgeted for the month when you get into it. That feeling is super comforting for me.
Somehow in an era where personal data on spending habits is supposed to be extremely valuable, they can't afford to fix the product, and this is the best we can get.
Every payday, I get an email notification from Mint asking if I recently made a large purchase, in the amount of my paycheck.
Why even bother having a transaction categorization system, if it can't tell the difference between a deposit and a withdrawal?
I've recategorized a certain transaction pattern and marked it "always categorize" every paycheck for several months.
I'm a big fan of how I can categorize expenditures and export them as CSV's or charts, which I can then send to my accountant for an easy tax season.
Without this (so far) free tool - as I have not paid for anything Intuit related minus likely my personal data - my annual U.S. taxes would be a massive pain in the rear end, being that I'm self-employed.
This is a solved problem in tech (OAuth, I think) so clearly there are perverse financial incentives (ie. my bank doesn't want to make it easy to me to export my data)
Does anyone know what would have to happen to make this possible? My bank is in Canada, if that matters.
You could create a company that stores all your credentials for you, and they perform an OAuth layer, but then you have to trust them :)
Fidelity Brokerage has this kind of account.
Is your solution technical, or do you also have a solution for the fact that it's a service banks have no incentive to offer? (And incentives not to)
I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've used in a long time
To clarify, personal capital is for US residents
From their support page:
>Although you can access the Personal Capital application from any location, we currently only support U.S based financial institutions (currency, USD) for linking accounts. Note that for security reasons, you will need a valid U.S. phone number to sign up for Personal Capital.
https://support.personalcapital.com/hc/en-us/articles/201169...
They want your phone number because their "advisors" blow up your phone every month or two trying to get you to use their financial services (which I'll never do). They also like telling me in the UI that I'm "not putting enough of my money" to work or some BS, just cause I like having a little nest egg.
That being said, it's a massively useful tool. I'll gladly let my Pixel spam filter their calls every couple months in return for being able to track my net worth and investments so easily.
I use it in addition to Mint actually. Mint for tracking spending and PC for macro view, like net worth/investments. I recommend Personal Capital for this as well.
To me it's still worth that annoyance. The only thing I use it for is balancing my portfolio across ~8ish different brokerage accounts.
The #1 thing that I need from Mint is 100% reliable integrations so it can automatically pull all my data, which it no longer provides. I have been talking to their support for about a year asking to fix an integration with US's largest mortgage servicer.
The #2 thing is reliable inference of transaction categories. That's also starting to wither. Categories are all over the place.
Everything else I really don't care about. Even if there's on interface and just a big "Export to CSV" button I'd be thrilled about it.
The Mint-assigned categories are terrible, and I regularly have to review and re-assign categorizations.
So Mint does it's own integrations instead of using something like Yodlee or Plaid. For me, Mint has been way more rock solid than sites that use the others. All of them have gotten way worse over the years as banks have cranked up security and generally been hostile to APIs like this.
Personally, I'm looking to move my financial services in order to get better integrations (specifically faster ACH transfers and integrations like Mint). There's no reason a secure solution (that doesn't involve me giving Mint my credentials and allows read-only access) can't be widely adopted.
It was easy to download transactions from participating banks (I think in OFX format?) and it was easy to see the last successful sync date per account. The UI made it straightforward to categorize my transactions and dead-simple to compare monthly spend against an easily mutable budget.
In fact it was so easy to use that for a good long while I found myself manually entering cash receipts and even tracking my cash purchases. And it cost $0. It felt better than Quicken for personal finance.
Maybe I have missed some major innovation in personal finance software -- I largely use Mint and home-grown spreadsheets now, and I keep hearing that people use paid tools like YNAB or free complementary-to-the-company's-real-job tools like the Personal Capital suite -- but this all feels like it's worse now.
Some early Microsoft products were so good - I was once lost in the middle of the Netherlands, typed a nearby company name in Microsoft Autoroute and got directions to my destination. All offline.
Nowadays, I’m can’t even get Windows 10 to navigate me to the correct program from the start menu search.
My biggest complaint about Personal Capital is the frequent phone calls from their financial advisors despite asking them to stop. I'd be happy to pay $10+ a month just for their aggregation services but my private bank is leaps ahead in terms of sophistication and access to alternative investments not typically available to the public.
I really wish there were self-hosted options for seeing all of your finances in a single spot. Even paid options. That's what I really want.
I've been using it for years. It does what it needs to do, and literally nothing else.
Most of the charts and graphs work fine. It seems to be specifically the investment ones that require Flash, which is a bummer. Honestly I'd never used them before, so hadn't even noticed.
But in contrast to other software that completely overhauls its interface (usually for the worse) every few years, and turns into slower and slower bloatware... I guess it's kind of refreshing to me that Mint hasn't changed... knock on wood.
For those who haven't heard of Lunch Money, we launched originally on Show HN back in October 2019. I'm a solo founder and this is my full-time job. My motivation is to create a non-opinionated, delightfully simple to use personal finance tracker. We are a subscription-based service and I don't intend on ever selling ads. My intention is to keep this an indie product and continue improving for our small but growing user base.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to jen@lunchmoney.app
The question in my mind is: What is the matter with global banking institutions such that this has to be a third party service instead of a service that a well-organized banking consortium could provide to its clients? I would totally switch my checking account if it came with a good Mint clone.
Is it asking so much for an interface from my bank that can classify transactions, include basic budgeting features, and pull in some data from other accounts?
(I know, I know, it's one of those things that sounds like a pretty simple CRUD app until you look into any of the industry-specific technical details.)
Speculating for account syncing, but there is a zillion different provider integrations they would have to maintain for something like a mortgage, and such an account would change hands many times to companies with different APIs.
A long time ago I used Mint. If I remember correctly, I had tons of syncing issues and problems navigating their UI. I tried USAA for a while, but eventually stumbled upon Personal Capital. I passionately dislike Intuit due to their pricing practices of Quickbooks Online, so I'd never use Mint again ;)
The real reason is that they charge for the paper checks, whereas the automated service was free, and so was a cost center for them.
If they had admitted that instead of trying to gaslight their customers I’d have respected them more.
Mint began as a web-scraping service on top of Yodlee, who literally had tech support “visually debug” your session when your connection doesn’t work. So that spinning wheel is not network slowness - it is like someone putting their sandwich down so they can debug. Ok I am exaggerating a bit - but u get the idea
Up until a rewrite of their online banking site to have a more modern, responsiveUI, my credit union used to have a pretty good implementation of the first of those. (After the rewrite, those features still exist, but hamburger buttons and poor information density have made it impossible to use them efficiently.) I honestly thought it did a better job than Mint for a time when I was young and did everything, even my credit card, with that one financial institution.
Which brings us to that last one, "pull in some data from other accounts". My guess is that that would be hard to get past senior decision makers, precisely because it would make it easy for customers to keep most their money elsewhere.
I feel like something is not right when the utility of my banks' websites is pretty much inversely proportional to the recentness of their last redesign.
I went from tracking just one credit card, to tracking all my accounts, and now back to just one credit card.
Example: I use a credit card for everyday purchases and then pay it off each month. Mint counted every transaction AND my payment at debits therefore each month it showed I was spending double. Despite my efforts to train Mint to stop this, it never worked.
Last year I tried adding all my financial accounts, but it fell flat on it's face and never resolved the issue I had with double reporting (despite Mint knowing everything about my financial world).
I recently pulled all my accounts and added back only my primary credit card. I'll now use it only for the occasional "gotcha" such as a bank fee, double transaction or unrecognized transaction. I no longer am interested in fixing miscategorization.
When I pay off my credit card, a transaction shows up on the credit card side, say +$1000, I put this is Credit Card Payment. Since I have my bank account also in Mint, another transaction of -$1000 comes my bank account and I put this in Credit Card Payment, so it cancels out.
I've done this enough that I no longer have to do it manually.
IF for some reason the sign is backwards, open a support case with them, tell them they are interpreting the data wrong, and after spending a little time convincing level 1 and 2 support you arent wrong, they forward your call to engineering. In my experience, everything ive ever reported to them about them incorrectly ingesting data, gets fixed. (not always super promptly, but they fix it.)
Using an online service for financial tracking seems crazy to me, given the data free-for-all that is going on now.
I've tried a bunch of these apps and they're either too expensive, don't support multiple currencies (a deal-killer for me), or don't work well.
I highly recommend them. The founders have kept it alive and even launched a much better account syncing feature in the last few months - I happily pay for their $5/month Pro account.
Our product is very optimized for people who want to see things ahead of time. Entering stuff manually, reminders, budgets, forecasting, all the way up to retirement planning.
About stock options: We do support automatic syncing with investment accounts. Is your institution not supported? Or is there some other issue you are facing?
If you'd like, you can email me at shashank@buxfer.com and I would love to assist you further.
It seems like if I don't pay the full amount I don't deserve my budget to be as secure as possible. And this is a no go for me.
1: We didn't have MFA until we had PRIME. Generally speaking, we only add new features to our higher-end plans.
2: Our business model doesn't allow us to give away stuff for free. No ads, no selling data, simple subscription based pricing. MFA costs us money (SMS, phone calls).
So that's the logic, which I understand might not be very convincing. We are exploring making it part of our free plan, or a lower tier plan.
One place to aggregate all financial accounts and give a clear picture, including bills, investments, categories, trends, credit score checks, and budgeting. Everything is easily synced. I don't need a desktop app, just a web app and an iOS app. There are manual solutions but I'm looking to have all this automated.
Basically Mint has nailed it if it wasn't completely abandoned and didn't as many account connectivity struggles. (it handles most of them well). They also have turbo tax, why isn't this integrated? You have your accounts connected already. Automatically pull the required forms from that financial provider into turbo tax. This doesn't seem impossible.
I don't mind the "offers" ad page, but when they started integrating ads in between transactions that was rather offensive. It's been a steep decline. I'm really hoping someone comes up with a strong alternative (VCs get on this). I'd be willing to pay annually too.
Most big US financial institutions offer it for free. BoA/AmEx/USAA are just a few named in this very thread.
Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I launched Funded [0] that follows this method. Would love to get feedback from the HN community too.
Right now, I'm leaning towards a subscription model because it makes the most sense. I think YNAB is too pricy and a personal finance app can sustain with a $2-3/mo subscription.
Is there any other monetization model that we should be looking at?
Once you price yourself at 0, it can be very difficult to convince users to start paying for what was once free.
I would generally recommend avoiding having a free period entirely, and instead offer an early adopters discount as well as a free trial period.
Since it sounds like you missed your chance on that one, I would look for ways to offer both a free and payed version. Again, the difficulty here is that once something is in the free version, you want to avoid removing it, so you will need compelling new feaures to make this work. You also need to make sure that the free version continues to leave a good impression.
Having said that, I suspect you will find there is a reason so many companies end up monetizing through avertisements...
Once the app is monetized, all new users will have to go through that. Even then, I think a free period is a good idea or maybe a freemium version. The only risk with freemium version is giving away too much or too little for free.
How does "Sign in with Apple" work if I want to share Funded with my somebody on another device that has their own Apple ID?
Even worse is these auto-budgets that try to take your previous 12 months of spending and use that as your future budget guideline. Thanks for telling me I have a $5/month starbucks budget, since on average I take out a coworker for coffee about that much (and again, one month I might take out 2 coworkers, and now I get an alert that I am over budget!).
I guess in general I am quite cheap, I don't need the "discipline" of being told how much I should spend in a month on things. If you don't have the self control to not spend too much on discretionary things like clothing or entertainment, I am not sure setting a budget is really going to help.
Funded takes an "anti-budgeting" approach. You only set up your obligations and savings. You're left with discretionary spending that rolls over every paycheck and you can spend it on whatever you want. Not tracked and not budgeted.
Lmk what you think!
Today I like Personal Capital. But it lacks breadth. Solid Portfolio tracking, Retirement Planner. Shallow budgeting, bill tracking, cash flow.
I miss MS Money
Love the fact that it is a paid app, so my data will not be monetized as a revenue model. Happy to pay for privacy.
They say no ads. They don't say they won't sell your data.
"Copilot protects your information with bank-level security and has read-only access from your financial institutions. We treat your personal data like we’d want ours to be treated, which means never selling or sharing it with third parties. Ever."
Source: https://copilot.money
Edit: Looks like it's been said already.
Considering how many people seem to use Mint just to download the CSV of their transactions for Excel or whatever, I'm surprised there isn't some sort of open-source scraping tool (or set of scrapers) meant to be used by developers (and normal people) that will simply grab data from your bank using your credentials and save them into some sort of standardized format.
The standards of such a tool would revolve around standardizing the inputs (url and auth) and outputs (structured financial info).
The obvious answer is that I should start it ("...2nd best time is now"). Unfortunately, I don't have the time. I suppose that's also the answer to the larger question.
Am I missing something, or is Mint asking me to hand over the credentials to all my other financial accounts? That strikes me a horrendously awful idea.
Even banks that explicitly prohibit user/pw sharing with external tools in their ToS (every one of them basically), will often have aggregation features in their portals that require you to enter the user/pw for the external accounts you want to connect.
They might even have back-end API's that allow other aggregators programmatic access to your data, that require your user/pw to auth. But don't share your user/pw with anyone, they say!
I know BoA definitely does, and that seems like Wells Fargo's implementation.
Someone else in the thread mentioned AmEx/USAA/PNC does it, but I can't seem to quickly find it via Google. I haven't used Chase, but I assume they also categorize their expenses. I guess I was assuming they do it since they all categorize expenses, it doesn't seem much of a leap to show a month to month breakdown of it.
I did the trial and looks pretty solid and modern.
Start with a (responsive) web site, then add apps as necessary. This service does nothing that requires an app.
I find that fact quite unsettling.
It's not really a budgeting app, though.
The nice thing about manual entry, and using Splitwise, would be that you could pull out your phone and say "your turn to pay" and treat it like a balancing act instead of transferring money. Whoever is behind, pays today.
Used it on a couple of trips and thought it was fantastic. No sign up required, free to use, and open source. Worked well for my use cases (trips, not month to month reconcilliation) so YMMV
For us, we like that the budget is tangible. There is only so much money we can withdraw from it, which helps us avoid blowing through our budgets. It also works well with the way we split costs. I make more money, so I put more into the pool every month, but other than that we don't need to think about it.
1.) Privacy reasons: they don't charge for the service so I pay via data sharing
2.) Legal concerns: my bank's TOS imply if I give my password to someone it harms my ability to claim fraud. I worry if there is ever a security issue with the protocols Mint uses, I will have my checking account drained or CC used willy nilly and have to fight uphill to dispute the charges.
I used Mint for many years to track my spending.
I found that moving my "entertainment" budget - for meals out, movies, and sundries - into cash led to me overall spending less, without the mental strain of pouring over things.
Most credit cards nowadays give pie charts and stuff similar to Mint in the web UI. I wish I didn't have to spread spending across multiple vendors since I maximize cashback, but I wish someone would examine whether, in the long run, cashback actually saves you money or if it just makes you spend more due to the frictionless nature of using a credit card. Casinos use chips for a reason.
I withdraw my entertainment money monthly, and it makes me think hard about each cup of tea out etc. I think in conversations about cashless being king, we forget the very real phenomenon of overspending with plastic.
Why can't your banker do your taxes for you? Why can't they tell you how you'll pay for your kid's college tuition? Why can't they give you a personalized budget to reach some level of wealth in a certain number of years? Why can't your banker tell you when you're ready to buy a house or if you're borrowing more than you can realistically afford? Why can't they tell you when you're reaching dangerously high credit card debt or whether you can really afford that auto-loan?
They could do all of this with the current data that they have. But imagine if you gave them more data, like your current employment position, geographic location, and family status. They might be able to tell you if you're being under or over-paid, how others similarly situated plan their savings, or when is the right time (if ever) to move from renting to owning real estate.
Banking systems have an enormous wealth of data, that can do so much good, but they are still mostly a simple table of deposits and withdrawals.
Most people have one bank account and maybe 1-3 credit cards. Often at the same bank. To me the digital experience for the big US banks like Chase and Amex are good enough that I don’t find something like Mint would add anything for me, and worse I can’t actually do anything with my account in an aggregator so what’s the point?
That's the kind of question that my bank's statements don't let me readily answer, but something like Mint does (I use YNAB because its flow works better for me, but YMMV).
Mint can be stupid at times (like counting transfers as spending), but you can fix those errors pretty easily. The ads are surprisingly irrelevant to me (e.g. offering a credit card that's worse than the one I primarily use), but I don't really care about that. If anything, I just need more investment guidance, not more credit cards...
It also miscalculated cash flow. Graph shows negative when in reality it is positive.
I guess it is a price to pay for acquisition.
This is pattern and I have witnessed it happening in india too with personal finance products. Infact founders are expressly building products on mint model: create free expense tracking app, spend a year on customer experience, acquire millions of users, and finally shift their focus on upselling financial products leaving customers in the lurch. This looks like a brutal barter system to me.
One day users will figure out a solution to this pervasive problem in software industry and will choose products/tools prudently.
The Flash issue is also terrible.
For more challenging but important features
- With companies like Amazon, a purchase can span multiple categories. While fraught with privacy issues, an innovation in this space would be to work with payment providers to capture more information, like receipt line items. If an amazon purchase could be split into my groceries vs media, that'd be amazing.
- I feel like Mint's budgeting misses the mark and is useless to me. While literal categorizations can be useful for digging into the data, it isn't how I budget. For example, "fun" money could come from several literal categories.
sixjars.xyz
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With a little more data it would be amazing. Just forward your Gmail to it and it would line up all your receipts with all your credit card purchases. Now its revenue model is Honey and giving you targeted adds for competitors to specific SKUs it knows you are buying.
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Who would be dumb enough to give all their emails to this type of company? I don't know, but there are piles of people that give out their bank passwords to "validate their accounts" with Plaid. So maybe it is not too low.
I prefer the so-called zero-based budgeting. I dislike YNAB though.
I use a Google Sheet to track my worth bi-annually. It's real easy to update and only doing it twice a year forces me to not micro-manage my money which reduces bad-decisions and stress.
Here's the template with some dummy data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AKA3qM8T5PNbmXoW5XKY...
Somebody doesn't get how business units work. Your OPEX has to constantly decrease while the revenue has to constantly increase, but your revenue mostly goes to other BUs' CAPEX. So there's no money to fix tech debt, unless it's buying crap to scale with, if you can show growth. Doesn't matter if your daddy is M$, your allowance will still suck unless your lemonade stand is making bank.
Sorry for the shameless plug! Thought it would be appropriate to share my solution as it might help some of you out.
Are there other competing tools that have similar reach connecting to financial institution accounts?
Nowadays it’s a bit more integrated with the banks, with oauth support etc. but initially they were basically just scraping.
And yes, this is a massive security hole and likely against the banks TOS (deliberately giving your credentials to a third party).
Personally, I'm looking to move banks/credit cards towards services with better integration at the expense of other things like better returns.
But the biggest issue I am seeing is while a lot of services claim to try to be smarter, they often miss a lot of the smaller features (like actually categorizing my Amazon purchases properly...) that Mint has.
I am evaluating Albert (and going to look at some of the others here), but curious if anyone has any recommendations?
That doesn't mean it couldn't be a thriving product, but for that to happen Intuit would have to be wringing a lot of money out of it somehow through a side channel or back channel.
A semi-neglected aging service probably isn't the worst scenario for its users.
Are any products mentioned here more tailored to that use case? More about the transaction log and quick glance at assets/debts than the budgeting and charts?
I assumed it was Mint the Linux distro, it's one of the most over used company names.
Mind for personally has been a game changer. It helped me take control of all my finances.
Bug or a feature :)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobilligy....
I left because it felt like updates never happened; they just lost or reset my cost basis for my three years worth of investment tracking at the time; and it was now owned by a company hostile to tax-payer convenience.
It felt great to leave.
Anybody know the history about why Microsoft Money failed to hold ground?
Clean UI, uses Plaid to import transactions, paid for by subscription, not your data.
It's my understanding that, at the least, Plaid doesn't sell data to third parties you don't authorize. If I'm wrong about this I'd love to know.
FWIW, I worked at Intuit after that divestiture, and there are super smart honest people there, comparable to high ranking pals from years of Apple engineering days, but, cripplingly, some total engineering absurdities from old-timers.
Basically, technical debt was vast.
It also doesn't help they run on Plaid and Plaid's a ticking time bomb piece of tech (despite what they sold for).
my experience: I felt like I was a Responsible Adult when I used it, but didn't actually budget any better.
I wish mint kept going. Used to love it.
From the quote: "For all of Mint’s failure to evolve and improve, its core functionality continues to be fundamentally useful."
--> Brilliant. That makes it EXACTLY how I like my tools & apps. It has basic, streamlined, mature, well-evolved and easy functionality, it works well and predictably, the owner is not trying to squeeze it out of extra revenue, and all's well with the world.
Full-screen autoplay (with sound) video add for a credit card.
My personal story on this:
I was a Mint early-adopter, and some time before Intuit purchased Mint I was also a TurboTax online user. I liked using Mint mostly just to track my net worth / assets and did so for several years.
Fast forward a year or two, and Intuit had purchased Mint. A few months later I came to realize that Intuit was now creating TurboTax accounts for all existing Mint users without bothering to cross-reference existing account email addresses between the two databases. When I signed up for Mint originally, it was using your full email address as a user name. So now, I had a Mint account which was my email address, an old TurboTax account which had that same email address on file, but a different user name, and a new TurboTax account which WAS my email address, tied to the existing Mint account.
So what happened? I tried to log into Turbo Tax using the account I already had used for taxes in the past to import my Mint information, but I was told that email address is already in use by another TurboTax account - the one Intuit created for me instead of merging my existing accounts...
Several phone calls later, I was assured the only path forward was to start using the new account to do my taxes if I want Mint integration. I decline and asked why they couldn't just get rid of the erroneous new account they created for me and let me combine the ones I already had. I was not about to lose years of tax returns on my old account to start a new account without that information. They said it was impossible.
Ultimately, I decided I'd delete the old Intuit/TurboTax account and start fresh, to take advantage of the integration features. They told me they were required by law to keep my old TurboTax account data, but that I could change the password to something random/long and change the email address to something non-existent to prevent myself or anyone else from being able to log in anymore.
At this point, I was very annoyed, and chose a suitably-annoyed fake email address directing hatred toward Intuit, which I won't repeat here, but rest assured it included a reference to Intuit and non-standard sex acts. I also changed the password to a 64-character random string, which I did not write down. Fast forward a couple weeks...
Lo and behold, I tried logging into Mint a few weeks after changing my Intuit password and wouldn't you know, that account was inaccessible now, the exact opposite of what I was told they were going to do... Better yet, I couldn't reset the password because I had changed the account email address on file to the aforementioned vulgarity. Now you see where this is going... I called customer service, and the rep assured me she could help if I could recall the email address I had used... So, I apologized in advance, and proceeded to tell her the address was "Eff"IntuitInThe"A"@"eff"you.com (something in this ballpark, and edited for language).
Needless to say, we had a good laugh. I haven't really used Mint ever since, and have been considering deleting my account (if I can even do that without destroying my TurboTax account...)