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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#201

Post by lotsofpulp »

freeone3000 wrote: post #196
lotsofpulp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like all the big banks already have that functionality.

Wells-Fargo sure doesn't, nor does BMO, nor does American Express... so I'm not sure what you mean here?

https://www.wellsfargo.com/online-banking/my-money-map/

I know BoA definitely does, and that seems like Wells Fargo's implementation.

Someone else in the thread mentioned AmEx/USAA/PNC does it, but I can't seem to quickly find it via Google. I haven't used Chase, but I assume they also categorize their expenses. I guess I was assuming they do it since they all categorize expenses, it doesn't seem much of a leap to show a month to month breakdown of it.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#202

Post by pfranz »

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…

> The #1 thing that I need from Mint is 100% reliable integrations

So Mint does it's own integrations instead of using something like Yodlee or Plaid. For me, Mint has been way more rock solid than sites that use the others. All of them have gotten way worse over the years as banks have cranked up security and generally been hostile to APIs like this.

Personally, I'm looking to move my financial services in order to get better integrations (specifically faster ACH transfers and integrations like Mint). There's no reason a secure solution (that doesn't involve me giving Mint my credentials and allows read-only access) can't be widely adopted.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#203

Post by alanlovestea »

roywiggins wrote: post #52
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…

Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product? The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the…

Credit Card referral was/is a big business. I remember personal finance bloggers were making $50 dollar for each referral. If mint can convince each customer to get a new card every year, it will be a 500 million dollars business. It is not huge but a sustainable business.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#204

Post by stergios »

0xffff2 wrote: post #81
SnowingXIV wrote: post #65

It's a real shame that there isn't legitimate competition in this space. And before you mention it, personal capital is not a replacement as it solves a different problem. One place to aggregate all financial accounts and give a clear picture, including bills, investments, categories, trends, credit score checks, and budgeting. Everything is easily synced. I don't need a desktop app, just a web app and an iOS app. Th…

Funny. I feel exactly the opposite. I use Quicken because I don't need a web app or an iOS app, just a desktop app. And I'm happy that Quicken seems to be mostly abandoned. It does what I need and I don't want a bunch of flashy new features added every month when I'm not going to use them anyway.

I think the original Quicken is in good hands. Eric Dunn, the CEO of the new company maintaining and enhancing the original version of Quicken, has a long and successful history with Quicken. His involvement with Quicken goes back to 1985, just one year after Scott Cook and Tom Proulx founded Intuit. Having some of the original leaders guiding Quicken again is a hopeful sign that it will remain relevant on the desktop.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#205

Post by basch »

sciurus wrote: post #99
koboll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life. The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Pl…

Try Personal Capital ( https://www.personalcapital.com/ ). I used Mint for years but jumped ship about 6 months ago and am glad I did so.

Ive had both for forever, and I dread the day I need to export all my custom categorizations and reinput them into pc. And ill lose all my budget vs actual data. If you were just starting out now, Im not sure what id recommend, because mint still does some things better (maybe im just more familiar with) than pc. But in a strict sense, pc is lightyears ahead of mint. I might have some stockholm syndrome.

I love being able to instantly graph net cash flow over the last 10 years.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#206

Post by HashHishBang »

L_Rahman wrote: post #154
duderific wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I don't know what they did but having to consistently re-categorize rent payments from whatever nonsense they were auto-categorized as killed it. Automation is great when it doesn't get things comically wrong.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#207

Post by robpegoraro »

mherdeg wrote: post #86

I don't know whether this is just nostalgia, or maybe my finances used to be less complicated, but nothing beats the experience I had with the Microsoft Money desktop app. It was easy to download transactions from participating banks (I think in OFX format?) and it was easy to see the last successful sync date per account. The UI made it straightforward to categorize my transactions and dead-simple to compare monthly…

Fun alternate history: Microsoft wins government approval of its Intuit purchase and spins off Money to Novell as promised, Novell handles Money as well as it did WordPerfect, and then nobody wants to challenge Microsoft-owned Quicken.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#208

Post by basch »

matmann2001 wrote: post #163
brownbat wrote: post #9

The Flash requirement in 2020 kills me. Account synch gets stuck and never finishes. Correctly categorizing transactions usually involves pulling up my bank website to see how the charge was really originally described. Mint pulls some info on this but it's often truncated, so you can try to set up rules but there are often collisions because of that bad incoming data. Somehow in an era where personal data on spendin…

I feel like they aren't even trying with the categorization. Every payday, I get an email notification from Mint asking if I recently made a large purchase, in the amount of my paycheck. Why even bother having a transaction categorization system, if it can't tell the difference between a deposit and a withdrawal?

Cant you tell it "always categorize"

Re: What happened to Mint?

#209

Post by alanlovestea »

samename wrote: post #158
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.

You can use Quicken. It is a desktop software and does not store your data/password in the cloud.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#210

Post by basch »

josefresco wrote: post #60

I've used Mint for years. It started as a cool tool to track you transactions. It then turned into a tool to sell me credit cards. The transaction logging never got "smarter". Example: I use a credit card for everyday purchases and then pay it off each month. Mint counted every transaction AND my payment at debits therefore each month it showed I was spending double. Despite my efforts to train Mint to stop this, it…

When I pay a credit card, its a credit and a debit. You see the money leave a checking account, and applied to the credit card.

IF for some reason the sign is backwards, open a support case with them, tell them they are interpreting the data wrong, and after spending a little time convincing level 1 and 2 support you arent wrong, they forward your call to engineering. In my experience, everything ive ever reported to them about them incorrectly ingesting data, gets fixed. (not always super promptly, but they fix it.)

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