Mint Closing Down. Alternatives?

[therethere]

I just read an article that Mint is closing down Jan 1 2024. I'm really at a loss. I've meticulously tracked all my spending in Mint since probably 2014. It really helped me stay on track, utilize all extra money to pay down my student loans, and keep rolling savings for non-monthly bills. I love being able to access the trends to see where my expenses are increasing year over year. I'm sure my tracking is considered overly obsessive. But honestly, not sure how to even feel like I am managing my money without it.

I don't live paycheck to paycheck. So not having a budgeting app isn't going to have devastating consequences. But at the same time I don't want to let go of having a really good grasp of where our money is going. It was also so helpful to have for continually credit card churning and keeping track of those expenses on new accounts.

Any real free alternatives out there that are pretty similar? I used YNAB around 2012 and hated it. Personal capital does not play nice with my accounts.

[tygertygertyger]

Oh what a bummer! I've been using Mint for years. I found an article confirming it that says it's pushing users to credit karma. I don't have any suggestions - I also didn't love personal capital for this use. Hope someone else has good thoughts. 

[Morning Glory]

I saw that today too. It did say some of mint's tracking functionalities are also moving to credit karma but i hope it is not too spammy or cluttered. I like Mint's clean interface and unobtrusive ads, and don't really need suggestions on how to "build credit".

[GilesMM]

Not closing down, just moving over to Credit Karma.

[ChpBstrd]

Enshittification

At what point do we stop getting excited about the latest promo product on the internet? If it's crap, it's crap. If it's good, it'll either disappear or go behind a paywall at just about the point you start to depend on it. People paying for Twitter accounts... how long until your email starts charging a fee?

[SmashYourSmartPhone]

Not closing down, just moving over to Credit Karma.

Yes, which talking to people who use it, is very aggressive about trying to get you further into debt with credit cards, loans, etc.  It encourages you to take on pointless debt, which is of course very profitable to originate.

At what point do we stop getting excited about the latest promo product on the internet? If it's crap, it's crap. If it's good, it'll either disappear or go behind a paywall at just about the point you start to depend on it. People paying for Twitter accounts... how long until your email starts charging a fee?

Your email doesn't charge a fee?  I have paid for email hosting for... some long while now.  It beats the free services in the control I have over it, and I would rather pay than pay in injected ads.  Although I no longer use web clients and have gone back to Thunderbird for email.

But, about 5-8 years ago the trend became unavoidable and, in many ways, self fulfilling.  Google cannot get traction with new products as everyone, reasonably, believes "This too shall pass," and waits for them to cancel the new product.  Which, never getting traction, then happens.

In any case, are there local applications one can use to monitor finances without having to manually enter everything?  Or is that simply the only sane state anymore?

[DeepEllumStache]

Well this is disappointing. Guess my new project will be to figure out a replacement.

[therethere]

Not closing down, just moving over to Credit Karma.

From what I've read they don't seem to be migrating over the transactions and budgeting aspect of Mint. Which, is the entire point of it. I hope I'm wrong. I can ignore ads pretty easy so that wouldn't bother me. But I need something to aggregate all my data for budgeting and to ensure I'm not getting AF or bogus charges as I've got LOTS of accounts. I'm not kidding when I say I monitor it daily. It also helps me know how much I can draw down my account for contributions to brokerage and such.

[Tass]

Anyone know if they have a simple way to download old data? I don't use Mint anymore but did for several years and don't have that historical data backed up elsewhere.

[reeshau]

You could complete the irony and use Quicken's (spun off from Intuit some years ago) Simplifi product.  Not free--$4 / month, with intro offer.

I've not used it, but it seems like a similar purpose.  And as said upthread, you can have higher expectations of service and privacy as a paying customer.

[GilesMM]

Not closing down, just moving over to Credit Karma.

From what I've read they don't seem to be migrating over the transactions and budgeting aspect of Mint. Which, is the entire point of it. I hope I'm wrong. I can ignore ads pretty easy so that wouldn't bother me. But I need something to aggregate all my data for budgeting and to ensure I'm not getting AF or bogus charges as I've got LOTS of accounts. I'm not kidding when I say I monitor it daily. It also helps me know how much I can draw down my account for contributions to brokerage and such.

Your favorite Mint features are moving to Credit Karma:Continue to see your financial accounts in one place

• Continue to view your transactions

• Continue to track your spending

• Continue to view your cash flow

• Continue to track your net worth trend over time

[Morning Glory]

Has anyone tried credit karma yet?

[Tass]

I use their credit score tracking, and I believe I've filed taxes with them once before. For budgeting I'm a YNAB user though.

[getsorted]

I use Mint every day. This is big news for me!

That budget feature is being nixed doesn't surprise me-- it has been progressively neglected (or, to be frank, enshittified) since the Intuit purchase and has some real limitations.

Some of the original Mint team founded Monarch and they have a post about the shutdown:
https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down

They actually make a pretty compelling case for using a paid service.

I would love to use YNAB but their fee is so high and they don't aggregate data at all.

[englishteacheralex]

This is quite a blow! I've been using Mint since 2011. Just did a quick search of various budgeting apps because we really can't live without one.

Every Dollar, the Dave Ramsey app, is $80/year.

Simplifi, through Quicken, is running a promo for $36/year. NYT Wirecutter recommends this one. After ten minutes of research, I'm leaning towards Simplifi, but I could be swayed elsewhere.

Monarch, the company led by the guy who wrote the article posted upthread, is $100/year.

YNAB is $100/year.

We're at a place financially where these fees will not matter to us at all, and we track spending meticulously and use the data for our budgeting decisions...there is no way we will not find some kind of replacement.

Thanks for the heads up! I did not know this was happening! I've been considering switching apps for years, but I have so much data in Mint I didn't feel like switching. Now that we have to, I'll be on the lookout for a better option.

[Tass]

I've seen people on the forum mention GnuCash, which is apparently free, but I know nothing about it myself. Thoughts on that one?

[Morning Glory]

I've seen people on the forum mention GnuCash, which is apparently free, but I know nothing about it myself. Thoughts on that one?

It's free but you have to input transactions yourself.

https://crm.org/news/gnucash-review#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20doubt%20that,those%20on%20a%20tight%20budget.

[Tass]

YNAB does automatic transaction imports or I wouldn't use it. (I know it didn't originally, though.)

[Morning Glory]

YNAB does automatic transaction imports or I wouldn't use it. (I know it didn't originally, though.)

Thanks I changed my post. The most valuable feature for me of Mint is to be able to look at all transactions on one site so I know if transfers went through and can make sure there aren't any forgotten payments or fraudulent activity. 

[arebelspy]

Following.

I use Mint to basically import all my transactions (bank accounts, PayPal, credit cards) and automatically label them, so that come tax time I can search up all the various items I need.

The value for me is in it automatically inputting and labeling the transactions (fairly accurately, and I can set rules for some things to label them certain ways) so that my amount of time needed is minimized.

Is there a good alternative for this use case?

[grantmeaname]

I moved over to Empower, fka Personal Capital. It's not much worse than Mint at correctly categorizing transactions, although that's admittedly a very low bar to clear. Lately Mint has not synced with Fidelity well which is my main credit card and all but one of my investment accounts, and that's rough, but I also had four months of double transactions to start the year and a lot of recurring wrongly classified transactions that are resistant to my rules for them. I like Empower fine but I haven't dug into the spending data much because I've only had the account four days.

[solon]

Have you tried a blank sheet of paper?
https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/this-is-how-to-make-a-budget-youll-actually-stick-with-b0556a28?st=puqgqmvxrm8p46f&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

[grantmeaname]

A blank sheet of paper does none of the things I need Mint for. It neither pulls in transactions from 40 different financial accounts nor summarizes them.

[engineerjourney]

ughhhh posting to follow.  I love Mint's (mostly) easy downloading of my transactions and syncing of accounts.  I definitely don't have time to manually input anything.  And I have so many accounts. 

[charis]

Ugh!  I have been using Mint for a decade and log in everyday, more than once.  I even used it to keep track of HSA reimbursements for 3-4 years when we couldn't afford to pay all of our medical bills out of pocket.  As someone who does credit card/bank account hacking, I rely on it heavily for pulling data from many, many accounts and avoiding fees.

I never have to manually enter transactions, the only minor inconvenience is two step verification on a couple of accounts and changing the category sometimes.

[index]

You all just need to pony up $79/yr for Tiller https://www.tillerhq.com/ and be done with it. You own all your data as it is in your own Google Sheet or Excel. You can set up your own autocategorization rules, split transactions, and break categories down however you want. There is also a large community of spreadsheet nerds producing open source sheets to look at your data in more ways than you can imagine. I've been with them for 2 years now after wasting 10 years on Mint and Personal Capital.

I also tried Simplifi which I really liked, but it will not (or did not at the time I used it) let you change account designation. I use a Fidelity CMA as my checking account and it was categorizing all my bill pay and income as investment transactions with no way to fix it. I've not tried it since it was brand new so they may have improved it. 

[ChpBstrd]

This will make budgeting trickier, but I don't need another bill.

On the bright side, I can stop checking my net worth obsessively.

[SmashYourSmartPhone]

Has anyone tried credit karma yet?

A coworker has used it for some time, and has reported it is very, very aggressive at trying to convince people that they need to take out loans (for no defined reasons), more credit cards, etc.  It is very focused on ensuring you are a good little debt slave.

[Tass]

As a credit card churner, I mostly just view it as showing me options for what card to open next. Of course, I get info from a source like doctorofcredit before committing.

Amusingly, even though it has info on all the cards I've ever opened by definition, it frequently suggests I open cards I already have.

[charis]

As a credit card churner, I mostly just view it as showing me options for what card to open next. Of course, I get info from a source like doctorofcredit before committing.

Amusingly, even though it has info on all the cards I've ever opened by definition, it frequently suggests I open cards I already have.

Do you use credit karma for the same features as Mint - transactions, trends, etc?  I'm also wondering if we can transition old data from Mint.

[Tass]

As a credit card churner, I mostly just view it as showing me options for what card to open next. Of course, I get info from a source like doctorofcredit before committing.

Amusingly, even though it has info on all the cards I've ever opened by definition, it frequently suggests I open cards I already have.

Do you use credit karma for the same features as Mint - transactions, trends, etc?  I'm also wondering if we can transition old data from Mint.

Nope, sorry. Just credit scores and taxes. As I've said above, I use YNAB now, but I do have some old data in Mint I'd like to download before they close it.

[beee]

Check out HoneyMoney, I've been running it solo since 2011.
It's my small side project with several hundred paying customers.

I believe in the value of manually tracking finances for greater mindfulness.
So it's designed to simplify the process.

Here's a screenshot of my October, for example:

[charis]

I'm definitely looking for automatic tracking.  I have a spouse and we have many accounts and credit cards.  Manually entering transactions is not going to do it.

[Morning Glory]

I just signed up for Fidelity Full View (pulls in the transactions like Mint, free if you have a Fidelity account). So far I have only added a few accounts just to play with the functionality.
Good:
-account adding/syncing and overall look is just like Mint. So far I have added my credit union, online bank account, and 2 credit cards with no issues.
-transaction amount data pulls in accurately and is easy to see on the main page, although the categories are a little creative (Aldi is a doctor and the DMV is a daycare, etc.)
-transactions can be recategorized/split fairly easily
   ETA: I was able to set up "rules" for recategorizing transactions so that the sewer bill doesn't get marked as "general merchandise" every month, for example. This took about an hour.
-more investment data than mint however I have not added my non-Fidelity investment accounts yet.

Bad:
- It double-counts cc payments as spending when looking at spending totals. (Mint did that with Target but not other credit cards). It is possible to manually recategorize them though.  ETA some of the rule-setting took care of this.
-no "spending by merchant" view which was the way I liked to use Mint to look at monthly and annual spending. The category view should be ok for this use if I keep on top of categorizing transactions correctly.
-No mobile app

Updates (as I go):
-My state 457b account is not supported-I was able to manually enter the amount for net-worth tracking purposes
-house value does not update automatically via Zillow (I do not particularly care about this feature)
-paypal is not even recognized
-sofi does not connect
-TIAA acted like it would connect but did not-Mint has the same problem though it worked, it just took a few minutes to register for whatever reason
-Robinhood-not recognized at all
-feature that Mint doesn't have: it knows which part of the mortgage payment is principal vs interest and automatically deducts the principal part from spending (this feature can be turned off)

Accounts that synced with no problems were:
Chase
Discover
Amex
Target Red Card
Capital One
Vanguard
Scholar Share
Corning Credit Union

This looks like it will be fine for aggregating cc transactions, tracking spending and net worth. The accounts that aren't syncing aren't ones I use all the time so I can manually update every 3 months or something. not being able to see when cash landed in paypal will be annoying however I usually get an email as well.

Picture is the spending report for last 30 days after I fixed all the transactions (I paid annual homeowners insurance and trash service this month so it's a little high). Each category can be clicked on to view subcategories as well as associated transactions:

[Tass]

-more investment data than mint however I have not added my non-Fidelity investment accounts yet.

Our one non-Fidelity investment account shows up with an "unknown" asset allocation. No big deal for us because that account is 100% domestic stocks, so it's easy to correct for, but this would be an issue if you had a more complicated setup and wanted the system to show asset allocation.

I don't use Fidelity for transactions, just overall asset tracking between myself and my partner.

[charis]

Good tip.  I have a Fidelity HSA and Full View is a tab.  I guess I'll start adding a couple of accounts to see how it goes.

[Scandium]

Has anyone tried credit karma yet?

A coworker has used it for some time, and has reported it is very, very aggressive at trying to convince people that they need to take out loans (for no defined reasons), more credit cards, etc.  It is very focused on ensuring you are a good little debt slave.

Meh, then I really don't care. I'm not an idiot so I won't do that, so they can try all they want. I'll stay with credit karma if my transactions etc transfer over. And will see how it is.
People are saying Mint has ads?? Do you not have adblock?! Just unbearable to browse without it, how do you do it..

Good tips for alternatives here, I will try some of them out. I don't mind paying. But it has to have automatic transaction import! I know when I looked YNAB did not, but now some say they do? I really don't need the budgeting/assigning cash to buckets stuff, but something that gives overview of where my money goes

[elysianfields]

What's wrong with using Quicken?  Yes, there's an annual subscription, and it's been providing more value that the old buy-the-newest-version-of-quicken-every-three-years model that Intuit used before spinning it off.  Developers actively improve it on an ongoing basis, and it's easy to download transactions into the appropriate account.

GnuCash is free but takes more work to set up and uses double-entry accounting if that's your thing.  I found downloading transactions was more difficult to set up, and I have a long archive of transactions in Quicken, so haven't bothered to migrate to GnuCash.

[englishteacheralex]

What's wrong with using Quicken?  Yes, there's an annual subscription, and it's been providing more value that the old buy-the-newest-version-of-quicken-every-three-years model that Intuit used before spinning it off.  Developers actively improve it on an ongoing basis, and it's easy to download transactions into the appropriate account.

GnuCash is free but takes more work to set up and uses double-entry accounting if that's your thing.  I found downloading transactions was more difficult to set up, and I have a long archive of transactions in Quicken, so haven't bothered to migrate to GnuCash.

I'm working on setting up Simplifi on Quicken this week. So far, so good. It has a one month free trial, and for this year they're running a special for $36 for the year.

[LKS89gs]

Seconded!

You all just need to pony up $79/yr for Tiller https://www.tillerhq.com/ and be done with it. You own all your data as it is in your own Google Sheet or Excel. You can set up your own autocategorization rules, split transactions, and break categories down however you want. There is also a large community of spreadsheet nerds producing open source sheets to look at your data in more ways than you can imagine. I've been with them for 2 years now after wasting 10 years on Mint and Personal Capital.

I also tried Simplifi which I really liked, but it will not (or did not at the time I used it) let you change account designation. I use a Fidelity CMA as my checking account and it was categorizing all my bill pay and income as investment transactions with no way to fix it. I've not tried it since it was brand new so they may have improved it.

[Ron Scott]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

[economista]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I think some people are budget people and some people aren't. If you don't need a budget and don't have any issues doing it that way, then that is great for you.

I am a budget person. I need to know that I have control over my money and I would feel blind if I didn't track my spending each month. I have a limited amount of income in a higher cost of living area and after paying my mortgage I only have so much money left each month. Spending more on groceries means I have less left for other things and I have to move money around in my budget.

[ChpBstrd]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I've not had a budget my entire life, just monitoring savings and net worth and living with frugal habits.

The problem has arisen when I try to do better - to set a goal for instance - and then the goal isn't met or we spent too much anyway. This was still not enough to get me into budgeting because I could just turn up the frugal habits to 11. Then this quit working when my household lost the bigger of its two incomes to disability, and despite the habits we were just breaking even and saving nothing. I racked up a couple of overdraft fees before I realized I needed to use software to forecast spending. So lately I've been trying to start, using the ease of Mint's automation and auto-categorization to make it easier. But now Mint is going to s%@^.

I had abandoned my Personal Capital account a while back, because Mint was slightly better. Yesterday I dusted it off and so now I think I can use it. But I seem to have lost a lot of history by not keeping it up, and that affects the quality of my forecasts.

[englishteacheralex]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

Not everyone benefits from this sort of thing.

I started with Mint when I was single 14 years ago because I wanted to do a better job with saving and be more intentional about knowing where my money went so that I could optimize and really save exactly as much as my income would allow. I never had debt or money trouble, but I felt like I could get more serious about saving towards various goals.

I started by budgeting on a bi-weekly basis, corresponding with my paycheck. I did the budgeting on an actual piece of paper that I printed out with pre-set budget tables that I created on Microsoft Word. I used a calculator and reconciled all my accounts and started collecting data in order to be able to do projections on how much I'd be able to save.

I found this to be super motivating in terms of eliminating impulse buying and planning for discretionary purchases that I really wanted. It also helped eliminate those annoying once-in-a-while expenses, because I started setting up sinking funds for things like car repairs or contact lenses. I was planning for those things and setting money aside, and the budgeting helped me to know how much I needed to set aside and thus how much money was truly available for discretionary spending and saving.

So when I discovered Mint, it was a massive help because it automated all the things that I had previously been doing by hand in a binder. It also set up super nifty graphs and tracked my investments.

When I got married Mint was a total life-saver because both my husband and I check it all the time and use it like crazy to discuss our savings goals and expenditures. We share 100% of our finances and having everything so easily accessible and transparent makes it easy to communicate about what's going on with our money. We feel confident about our savings goals and have no trouble agreeing on our spending. We also love Mint for tax purposes--easy to track charitable giving for the year and make sure we've met our requirements to exceed the standard deduction--and also for our FSA accounts because we can reliably predict our spending on things that are use-or-lose.

There's a bit of a learning curve but to me financial budgeting/tracking tools help me think about our financial life almost as a business, taking the guess-work out of our money decisions.

[therethere]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I use it to monitor my budget but I really don't see that as the essential use now that we're not in debt. It does give me an idea if spending is trending up though like how much my grocery spend has increased with inflation for example. Or how much I spend on clothing per year (when there is only spend a few times a year).

A few non-budget reasons I use it and find it essential:
- I churn credit cards and bank accounts so I have 25+ accounts. I need it to ensure my payments are going through and I'm not getting charged annual fees. It's also great as a record to easily look back and see when the AF would come up so I can cancel the cards before then.
- I had 200k+ in student loan debt. I meticulously tracked budgets/spending so I could allocate every single extra cent to loan payments as soon as possible. I'm talking like weekly or even more frequent extra payments. When your loan is at 9.6% paying even a few days early makes a difference.
- In the same way I use it to know how much I can send to my brokerage or HYSA account at any given time. To do that I need to know what cash I have on hand, what I expect to spend before the next paycheck, and what my credit card balances are. I plug these into a separate excel spreadsheet which tells me how much free cash I can send to places at any given time.
- It also a great aggregator to be able to look back on dates of things. Think dates you bought something to see if it is still under warranty and having a reference to find the credit card statement. Dates of when you last got brakes or tires for your car. When and how much your last insurance payment was. It's way easier to search transactions in mint than it is to keep track of paperwork in a million locations.

[englishteacheralex]

Yes, totally! I forgot about that--what therethere said. So awesome to be able to have everything in one place so you can easily look up transactions for various reasons. When did we buy that? now you know!

[Ron Scott]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I use it to monitor my budget but I really don't see that as the essential use now that we're not in debt. It does give me an idea if spending is trending up though like how much my grocery spend has increased with inflation for example. Or how much I spend on clothing per year (when there is only spend a few times a year).

A few non-budget reasons I use it and find it essential:
- I churn credit cards and bank accounts so I have 25+ accounts. I need it to ensure my payments are going through and I'm not getting charged annual fees. It's also great as a record to easily look back and see when the AF would come up so I can cancel the cards before then.
- I had 200k+ in student loan debt. I meticulously tracked budgets/spending so I could allocate every single extra cent to loan payments as soon as possible. I'm talking like weekly or even more frequent extra payments. When your loan is at 9.6% paying even a few days early makes a difference.
- In the same way I use it to know how much I can send to my brokerage or HYSA account at any given time. To do that I need to know what cash I have on hand, what I expect to spend before the next paycheck, and what my credit card balances are. I plug these into a separate excel spreadsheet which tells me how much free cash I can send to places at any given time.
- It also a great aggregator to be able to look back on dates of things. Think dates you bought something to see if it is still under warranty and having a reference to find the credit card statement. Dates of when you last got brakes or tires for your car. When and how much your last insurance payment was. It's way easier to search transactions in mint than it is to keep track of paperwork in a million locations.

I get it.

I don’t churn cards and accounts, I have no loans, and I don’t borrow for longer than a card payment period, so. I can see if you’re optimizing against the system this kind of detailed tracking makes sense.

[charis]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I use it to monitor my budget but I really don't see that as the essential use now that we're not in debt. It does give me an idea if spending is trending up though like how much my grocery spend has increased with inflation for example. Or how much I spend on clothing per year (when there is only spend a few times a year).

A few non-budget reasons I use it and find it essential:
- I churn credit cards and bank accounts so I have 25+ accounts. I need it to ensure my payments are going through and I'm not getting charged annual fees. It's also great as a record to easily look back and see when the AF would come up so I can cancel the cards before then.
- I had 200k+ in student loan debt. I meticulously tracked budgets/spending so I could allocate every single extra cent to loan payments as soon as possible. I'm talking like weekly or even more frequent extra payments. When your loan is at 9.6% paying even a few days early makes a difference.
- In the same way I use it to know how much I can send to my brokerage or HYSA account at any given time. To do that I need to know what cash I have on hand, what I expect to spend before the next paycheck, and what my credit card balances are. I plug these into a separate excel spreadsheet which tells me how much free cash I can send to places at any given time.
- It also a great aggregator to be able to look back on dates of things. Think dates you bought something to see if it is still under warranty and having a reference to find the credit card statement. Dates of when you last got brakes or tires for your car. When and how much your last insurance payment was. It's way easier to search transactions in mint than it is to keep track of paperwork in a million locations.

I get it.

I don’t churn cards and accounts, I have no loans, and I don’t borrow for longer than a card payment period, so. I can see if you’re optimizing against the system this kind of detailed tracking makes sense.

You obviously didn't read all, or most of the comments before being shocked about the use of a product that you don't use or have familiarity with.  I only care about my savings and income as well.  Credit card churning (with a minor amount of account churning) has contributed well to my income.  I also have identified incorrect or fraudulent charges, refunds that were not processed, and recorded which which transactions were reimbursed by HSA/FSA (all related to income).

[tj]

I am shocked at how many people use services like this, some actually saying they “need” them.

I never had a budget. I don’t know or care what percentage of my spend goes to food or clothes or gas. I don’t need an app to organize tax return info. And my investments in retirement are set and forget.

I only ever cared about 2 numbers: my income and my savings.

What have I been missing?

I have no idea what I spend in a given month if that data is not available. i don't want to have to manually log in to each account and add up all the credit card transactions.


Having software is a huge time saver and it has nothing to do with budgeting for specific categories.

How would I know what my 25x target number is if I don't know what I spend?

[tyrannostache]

Seconded!

You all just need to pony up $79/yr for Tiller https://www.tillerhq.com/ and be done with it. You own all your data as it is in your own Google Sheet or Excel. You can set up your own autocategorization rules, split transactions, and break categories down however you want. There is also a large community of spreadsheet nerds producing open source sheets to look at your data in more ways than you can imagine. I've been with them for 2 years now after wasting 10 years on Mint and Personal Capital.

I also tried Simplifi which I really liked, but it will not (or did not at the time I used it) let you change account designation. I use a Fidelity CMA as my checking account and it was categorizing all my bill pay and income as investment transactions with no way to fix it. I've not tried it since it was brand new so they may have improved it.

I'm definitely intrigued--this looks like the perfect combination for me. I currently have Mint along with a very messy manually updated Excel sheet that tracks our various retirement/investment accounts. I mostly use Mint for tracking categories of spending against my budget, but I have to spend much more time than I like recategorizing transactions.