He forgot to mention all the innovation they've added to Mint in the way of new types of intrusive ads. Intuit bought Mint anti-competetively to protect Quicken. But they've also neglected Quicken and shifted it to a scummy subscription service. Probably they can't see a way making enough money off of personal finance. Intuit is a scummy company and I stay away from them. The real problem is banks not giving us open APIs to build our own personal finance tools.
What happened to Mint?
111–120 of 456 posts
Re: What happened to Mint?
#112I've never understood what motivated financial institutions to grant Mint access to account transactions and balances? Did pre-acquisition Mint somehow reach a tipping point in active users where financial institutions decided their customers would choose other banks if theirs wasn't accessible through Mint? Are there other competing tools that have similar reach connecting to financial institution accounts?
The financial institutions never gave mint access. What happened is that mint takes a users username and password then logs in as that user and downloads (or scrapes) the transactions.
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).
Re: What happened to Mint?
#113I started using Actual Budget[0] and I love it. Not more SaaS that can break a any moment or sell my data. End-to-end encryption and scripting built-in is just perfect for me.
Re: What happened to Mint?
#114Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. 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 ma…
1. Is your new service still based on Yodlee backend? Everyone else who provides any consolidation service seems to. I am not saying they are bad, but it is better to be clear upfront. 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…
Hi. Monarch co-founder here.
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!
Re: What happened to Mint?
#115I’ve never found these account aggregators to be that useful for me.
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?
Re: What happened to Mint?
#116After struggling with Mint and YNAB for a while, I figured that I didn't really want to budget. I was tired of categorizing and setting up $20 budgets. I ended up with a simpler methodology which is basically a MUCH simpler version of YNAB. It worked really well and I've stuck with this for a while now. Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I launched Funded [0] that follows this method. Would love to get feedback fro…
Maybe I am just wired differently, but every budgeting program is just annoying at best. I get "scolded" because I went over my $40 clothing budget budget because I bought a coat or a suit, or took advantage of a sale. I don't buy clothes one pair of socks at a time per month, I take advantage of good sales and every few years I need a suit. One way to potentially solve this is to "roll over" any excess from month to month.
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.
Re: What happened to Mint?
#117I've been using Mint consistently since mid-2016, and it's worked just fine for me. The Flash requirement for investment charts is annoying, but you can get around that with the trends charts by account. Frankly, what's useful to me is seeing the trends in my spending, earning, and savings rate over the past 3.5 years, and if I were to switch to another option that's being recommended here, I imagine I would lose all of that trend data.
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...
Re: What happened to Mint?
#118Anyone who has seen how Intuit has bungled Quicken for the Mac multiple times in multiple ways for over a decade would not be surprised. I'm willing to pay for upgrades and still incredibly frustrated.
Quicken is a different company now than Intuit, as of spring 2016.
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.
Re: What happened to Mint?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simple, like the other commenter mentioned, is by far the best bank-provided budgeting software, and it's not even close with the others. However, their entire philosophy is based around only using their debit card. I love them, but if you'd prefer to use a credit card, Wealthfront and SoFi offer similar less-powerful tools to track different accounts, predict savings, break up savings, and categorize transactions.
Simple blew it when they removed check mailing and then lied about the reason.
What was the reason they actually removed it? The official answer seemed to be a vague hand-wavy "not many of you were using it and it's better if you use our other budgeting tool and write out a physical check anyway."
Re: What happened to Mint?
#120Just going to post a great alternative that people over at http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ recommend Personal Capital http://personalcapital.com/ I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've used in a long time
> Just going to post a great alternative
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...