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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#151

Post by annexrichmond »

nerdkid93 wrote: post #144
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-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…

Out of curiosity, is Monarch using Plaid for financial data aggregation? I have been wondering how long it would take for a standalone budget/asset tracker to emerge using Plaid's services. It seems most Plaid users are selling other financial products, and tack on aggregation as an additional feature, like Personal Capital.

From their Privacy Policy[1], they are:

> We use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to gather End User data from financial institutions. By using our service, you grant Monarch and Plaid the right, power, and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from the relevant financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored, and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid Privacy Policy.

[1] https://www.monarchmoney.com/privacy

Re: What happened to Mint?

#152

Post by metalliqaz »

I use mint and it's so very helpful. I also have noticed some of the issues raised in this article. It's sad, but then again I've also marveled that the free service has lasted this long because I know I'm never going to click on any of the ads. Most people who are intelligent enough to budget with Mint are not going to pick a mortgage from a banner ad.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#153

Post by [deleted] »

nerdkid93 wrote: post #144
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-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…

Out of curiosity, is Monarch using Plaid for financial data aggregation? I have been wondering how long it would take for a standalone budget/asset tracker to emerge using Plaid's services. It seems most Plaid users are selling other financial products, and tack on aggregation as an additional feature, like Personal Capital.

[deleted]

Re: What happened to Mint?

#154

Post by L_Rahman »

duderific wrote: post #90
NegativeLatency wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transaction tagging is also super bad.

I used to use it pretty regularly, but I'd spend so much time categorizing transactions, one pulldown menu at a time. I got sick of it and haven't logged in in a long time.

This is the main reason I stopped using it. I don't know if they pushed an update to transaction tagging, but it got really bad all of a sudden making the product much less useful to me.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#155

Post by lucasmullens »

joshgachnang wrote: post #128

Does anyone have a suggestion for a finance/budgeting app that's easy to use for splitting costs? My girlfriend and I don't have joined finances, but we do generally split everything down the middle. So most things are "I pay with my card, tally it up, then you Venmo me your half at the end of the month." I'm currently using YNAB and then split each relevant transaction, but it's very very tedious.

Maybe have one shared credit card with two copies that you both use for all that stuff? Saves you from having to tally it up at least if it's all on there.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#157

Post by eldavido »

wpietri wrote: post #100
sshumaker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong mon…

That makes a ton of sense to me. In some areas, I think our natural categories obscure human variation that's important from the product perspective. For example, task management software sounds like a coherent thing. But in practice, people think and work so differently that there will never be a solution that everybody loves. At least from personal experience, personal finance is the same way.

Meta: do you view a product through the customer's eyes or through the eyes of the person making it?

That's been an important insight for me to understand. Describing something in terms of its features/how it works, you might say "photo sharing app". But this core feature could be wrapped, packaged, marketed, and described so many different ways: flickr, Instagram, Getty Images (!!), a scientific collaboration tool, etc.

"Task management" feels similar.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#158

Post by samename »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-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…

One of the features I think these types of products need going forward is end-to-end encryption. There's simply too much data being exchanged between Plaid, this service and any third parties used. Someone's every transaction, investment, and budget will be too lucrative not to sell. I would pay for a service that could keep all this data private.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#159

Post by andrewmunsell »

move-on-by wrote: post #150
awicz wrote: post #13

I switched to https://ynab.com a while back. It's not exactly the same concept as what Mint was intended to be, but I couldn't be happier with the move.

I tried really hard to like ynab, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. I think the hangup is that I'm not really looking for a budgeting tool, I just want to categorize and see where my money is going - less so planning. Its easy to do that with Mint as budgeting in Mint feels more like an addon then a core concept.

I don't really use YNAB to strictly budget either, but more for tracking as well. Essentially, I budget the fixed categories (mortgage, property taxes, insurance, etc.), move some fixed amount to a savings category, and then leave the rest as "To Be Budgeted".

Then, as the month goes on and some of the categories that didn't have a fixed budget are "over budget", I just move the required money to the individual category to zero it out. Anything that caries over to the next month goes to the savings category.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#160

Post by 3JPLW »

lxe wrote: post #149

I've been using Mint daily for 12 years. The #1 thing that I need from Mint is 100% reliable integrations so it can automatically pull all my data, which it no longer provides. I have been talking to their support for about a year asking to fix an integration with US's largest mortgage servicer. The #2 thing is reliable inference of transaction categories. That's also starting to wither. Categories are all over the p…

I use Mint purely as an API to coalesce and export the transaction history. I then use a Google Sheets workbook to view my balance and expenditures (by Mint-assigned category) over time — allowing for coarse insights, prioritization, and adjustment.

The Mint-assigned categories are terrible, and I regularly have to review and re-assign categorizations.

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