What happened to Mint?

Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) here– I encourage you to check us out! I started Lunch Money because I was also surprised there wasn't a modern-day competitor to Mint.

More like, "Why is Intuit so awful?"

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...)

It may not be much easier than your setup, but my fiancée and I have a shared Simple account that we both deposit $x to each month and then withdraw shared transactions. They make moving between shared and individual Simple accounts pretty easy and allow bucketing money into categories, which we use for various budgets (travel, restaurants, groceries).

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.

The addressable market for Mint is people that want to track their budget. They maxed out. Their only revenue model is giving you leads for credit cards based on broad categories.

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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'm not sure it's specific to a limited set of cultures. I think there would be fairly broad cultural support for it being considered diminutive. Besides, the core of the problem is that it's only valid when that business owner describes itself as a lifestyle business.