Hacker News Reader

Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

I use to look at Mint once a quarter. It gave a good high level overview of my finances -- it linked to all my accounts, had records of my assets, etc. Once a quarter I'd load it, see my total assets grow and my debts decrease, and get a strong sense of security.

What are some of the best alternatives for this sort of personal finance view?

View on HN

I didn't even use the budgeting/bells and whistles features. It was mostly a great way to download transactions in a unified format from a dozen different banks past their short retention periods. I hope something similar exists :-(

I came here to say exactly this. I don't need a budgeting tool, I need a single pane of glass that aggregates all of my accounts across multiple financial institutions and lets me run very basic reports against them. That's it. This product does not seem to exist.

Mint kinda did that, if you gave it permissions to access accounts.

Lotta trust required there, though. That cred DB gets compromised and that's your entire financial life

Yep. I meant now that Mint is going away, I won't have a tool to do that.

For me the risk was acceptable because it was read-only access from a very small number of institutions. But those institutions have changed over the 15 years I used Mint, so having the historical data from places I used to have accounts was immensely helpful in understanding things like how much net worth changed over time. Especially when I could layer in other accounts manually as well as estimated real estate values from Zillow. So "I bought a house" wouldn't show up as "I lost $X dollars" but instead "I owe $X on a mortgage against a house worth $Y."

Yup. Most alternatives people are proposing need you manually enter every transaction you make, and that instantly makes it useless. I want one that connects to every single bank account/investment portfolio/loan I have and updates it in real time. I have never found something as seamless as Mint in that regard.

I used Actual for a little while and ran into the same frustration; having to manually download and re-upload CSVs was driving me crazy.

I also loathe the idea of having to hand over the account credentials to any third party service--what I really want is my financial institution(s) to send webhooks of my transactions, or even just allow for an automated download of the CSVs. (I'd write a playwright bot, but the 2fa makes it difficult. Of course the accounts should have 2fa, I just want an API for getting my transaction data.)

Plenty of banks now support OAuth and only provide limited read-only access.

I used Mint in the same way and then migrated to Personal Capital after the Intuit acquisition. Unfortunately, they were sold by come company called Empower recently but it hasn't seemed to impact things on the Personal Capital side yet. Apparently it's branded as "Empower Personal Dashboard".

I've got ~4 or 5 bank accounts, a few different 401ks, some individual stocks via Equiniti or whoever, our mortgage, our credit cards, our house and car as assets (with values derived from Zillow and I think KBB?) - the only issues are the same ones I had with Mint where occasionally some service would need another login / password / 2FA or something and time out.

https://www.empower.com/sites/default/files/styles/large_hq/...

I use YNAB 4, and I manually input all transactions for my credit card usage. I feel that it makes me more conscious of my spending. It's certainly not for everyone, but I only have the one credit card that I put everything on. And I don't buy a tremendous amount of things that makes it very arduous. I also don't have a need to monitor my investment portfolio in real time. I check it once a quarter or so.

I don't know if I'm the weird one here. But I don't feel a need to connect all of my assets to constantly monitor them. I don't have any assets that necessitate that level of control.

I use a small company https://lunchmoney.app/

Founder is very responsive and easy to setup and apply rules/recurring spends

Personal Finance/Empower is very similar in terms of tracking various accounts and assets/debts, although many of the features are more focused on investments

I use tiller. It syncs bank data to Google sheets (or excel too now).

So you can build anything you want on top of it or just use the prebuilt templates.

I mainly use it for your exact use case.

Check out YNAB (You Need a Budget), its subscription based but can give you a good overview of your spending, and account health/wealth.

Honestly, just move your stuff into a spreadsheet and try to build your own integrations. Money management tools that aren't integrated into a trading platform or rhyme with "Slick Cooks" don't last long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com