Intuit Is Closing Personal-Finance App Mint, Shifts Users to Credit Karma | Hacker News Reader

Intuit Is Closing Personal-Finance App Mint, Shifts Users to Credit Karma

bloomberg.com

51 pointsgwintrob38 comments

So the messaging here is that people should stop budgeting and paying attention to their spending, and instead take on as much debt as possible, as long as they keep their credit score high?

Awful. I hope Mint users don't fall for this and think a credit scoring app is equivalent, to what I think for most was a budgeting app. Intuit is the worst.

The FICO credit score is in essence a metric measuring how good you are at staying in debt, sustainably, preferably for life. Something like paying off a sizeable credit card debt can hurt your FICO score, because now your debt:credit ratio is off kilter.

As far as I understand, paying off debt (talking credit cards here) helps your score because low utilized available rolling debt vs total limit is good. _Closing_ a CC account hurts because it lowers your available rolling credit limit. Paying off a debt like a mortgage is good, it lowers your debt-to-income ratio.

No, that's what I'm saying here: having too low a debt to credit-limit ratio (i.e. high-limit cards with no debt on them, termed 'credit utilization') can hurt your FICO score. From what I can tell, a credit utilization around 10-20% is optimal for FICO, but a credit utilization of, say, zero, will hurt.

I hear this quite a bit but is there any evidence for it?

I personally had a couple of months where my utilization was 0 and my score jumped by about 10 points (and it’s already relatively high).

Most online experts recommend a credit utilization below 10% and I’ve not come across one recommending a minimum utilization.

There's no evidence for any of it, because they're coy about the FICO rules, but if it's bullshit, it's bullshit straight from the horse's mouth [1]. I know that previously in my own credit reports I was given this specific 'justification' in the 'things that are lowering your score' column.

1 - https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-the-best...

Pretty sure that's complete BS, I have a great credit score and a few cards that I barely use alongside a few that I use quite often.

I've used mint literally since the very beginning. They tried to update a lot of things but really just made it worse.

Really sad. I'm definitely not switching to Credit Karma... time to give another app a shot.

Try finwiseapp.io :)

I'll give it a look. Are you affiliated in some manner?

They are. Looks like the creator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38090161

Note: I’m not forming an opinion on it or saying to use or not use it, was simply curious because I hadn’t heard of it.

WTF. This is the first I heard of this (no email notices). I hooked all my data up a few months ago, and now I feel betrayed. I need to shut that down.

Same here. Even if you go to the Mint.com site - no notice of anything changing.

I switched from Mint to YNAB years ago, which I highly recommend.

YNAB doesn’t allow maintaining your chosen spending per category over multiple time periods. Last time I checked

When I spend an extra 50 on groceries this month, I can’t then reduce groceries by 50 next month or 25 over 2 months. That doesn’t make sense to me for a budget

I also switched from Mint to YNAB a few years ago, and YNAB is head and shoulders better than Mint. I've always had good finances / self discipline and didn't think I needed YNAB, but it's been way better than Mint for me. It's easily worth the cost.

If you don't mind me asking, what makes it worth the cost for you? I'm a long time mint user with very good financial discipline and can't imagine paying $100 per annum for such a service. But I'm open to learning new things and would love to hear your experience...

I didn't understand this until after I switched to YNAB, but Mint wasn't future-focued enough for me. I've always been good about saving and tracking my spending, but with the way I used Mint, I usually only focused on the current month. I had good savings so I easily had ~5k of comfortable wiggle room floating around if I needed it for random expenses, but I also wasn't planning ahead in detail.

Example: Need new tires? Yeah, I had the cash, but I wasn't really expecting/tracking those things, so sometimes a bunch of expenses would all hit at the same time.

YNAB has a philosophy called "give every dollar a job." At first, this feels so intuitive that it's almost silly, but after you've used YNAB for 3+ months, it builds steam.

For instance, if I know now that I'm going to need new tires next summer, I can think "Do I want to spend $50 on dinner out today, or put the $50 into my 'new tires' fund to use in May? With Mint, I wouldn't be thinking about May. I'd be focused on the current month, or maybe one month ahead. But with YNAB, I budget much further out into the future, and I do so in granular detail. So no more "5k wiggle room cash on hand for random things in the future" -- everything is planned. I'm probably more type-A than most YNAB users, but I have 50+ categories to stash money into, including things like future vet bills, future car maintenance, specific funds for vacation in Spring 2024, Summer 2024, December 2024, etc. (Most people probably have fewer categories)

Pre-YNAB, I'd think "Do I want to spend $50 on dinner now, or do I want to save it?" With YNAB, I think, "Do I want to spend $50 on dinner now, or do I want it for my vacation in December 2024?"

The result is that mental tradeoffs are significantly more clear, and I can prioritize better. In terms of value, I'm honestly not sure if I save $100 per year, since I was very frugal even before YNAB, but the mental clarify of having full transparency into my current and future choices is easily worth $100 to me.

YNAB is definitely very "opinionated". You have to convert to their "give every dollar a job" budgeting method, but I found really works well for me.

I moved off of Mint when they were acquired by Intuit, so I felt the price was worth it maintain full auto-import capabilities in an ad-free app. (The way Mint advertised at the time didn't really bother me, but I assumed that ads would get more intrusive under Intuit)

Exactly. I didn't think that giving every dollar a job would be that important, since I was good at saving even with Mint, but it makes the mental tradeoffs so clear. Love it.

Does YMAB download automatically? When I looked at it before it was very manual

The original desktop app was all manual, but the web app has had auto-import from banks, credit card companies, etc.

Yes, it downloads automatically. There's also an option to do it manually if you'd prefer.

Intuit could open source it, but won't, because then they can't sell your financial data.

My issue with this move is that credit / debt is only one part of the financial picture. But - this seemed like a long time coming for Mint. I came across an app Piere that i've been checking out for budgeting (piere.com). They're new but what I like is that their budget is fully automated to set up and it has a cool "reconciliations" feature - i.e. when i go out to dinner and put my card down and share that expense / get repaid, they automatically only show me my share and I don't have to deal with all of those uncategorized Venmos or ridiculously incorrect budget categories

I use mint - having everything aggregated has been really nice and I was majorly disappointed when I got this email.

I guess it depends on how much functionality they pull over, but good chance it spells the end for my usage.

Switch to Fidelity, use their Full View. Highly recommend.

https://www.fidelity.com/spend-save/full-view/overview

Thanks for this. I had no idea this is something Fidelity even offered.

Does Full View allow for entering manual transactions? Some of my financial servicers do not have the ability to tie in nicely with things like Plaid and whatnot. Not to mention, I prefer to do everything manually anyway.

I don't have that context unfortunately, I only use institutions that can get plugged in by design.

Gave it a try but it seems like it's sort of a "work in progress". Their current version seemed okay, but then I tried what I guess is a beta version, and somehow two accounts I'd never entered showed up in my dashboard (a savings account and some other account). So either some test data somehow appeared in my dashboard, or someone else's account info leaked.

Also -- it worked in Safari (Mac) for some screens, but then threw an error on the screen and suggested I use Chrome.

Have you found that it's really ready for reliable usage? Feels very "beta-ish".

If you found Mint lacking for tracking and building wealth through investing, try Mezzi (I'm a co-founder). We're excited to help people more effectively manage their investments far beyond what Mint ever did. Think allocation breakdowns, concentration, tax loss harvesting, ETF fee monitoring, AI-powered suggestions, and more. You can learn more and sign up at Mezzi.com. Unlike Mint, we will never sell your data. Once we move out of beta, we will be a paid app but maintain a generous free tier.

I've been using Fina as an alternative anyway (https://fina.xyz)

Kinda like notion but for you Finances...seems like they could be the next modern financial tracking app

They completely lost me when their demo video had someone in a wizard costume from an apartment.

https://www.empower.com/empower-personal-wealth-transition

I’m a huge fan of https://lunchmoney.app. Small (1?) team and gets the job done for me.

For those looking for alternatives Lunch Money is a great replacement.

https://lunchmoney.app/

$100 per year? As much as Netflix sub for a personal fin app to track savings...it is way too pricy!

I really enjoyed lunchmoney while I used it. I only stopped using it because I broke some bad habits and built some good ones, and using the app no longer felt helpful in the way it needed to be. So, huge success story now that I think of it. I was pretty awful with money before I managed it this way.

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