By Dan Miller, WCI Contributor
Mint, the popular online budgeting and personal finance app, will cease to exist by early 2024, according to its parent company. Intuit, which bought Mint back in 2009, originally said that Mint would no longer be available as of January 1, 2024, but has since walked back that date. As of this writing, a specific end date has not been announced. I am among the many users of Mint, so it's now time to look at Mint alternatives and what apps and sites to use for budgeting and financial tracking.
Mint Is Going Away – When and Why?
Intuit announced in early November 2023 that Mint was being “reimagined” and that “some of its most popular features will be moving to Credit Karma.” Credit Karma is primarily thought of as a site where you can check your credit score and rebuild your credit, but Credit Karma does offer some personal finance tooling as well. Credit Karma was also purchased by Intuit (in 2020), and this seems to be a sort of consolidation of functionality within the Intuit platform.
As Intuit said in its announcement, “We are reimagining Mint as part of Intuit Credit Karma, expanding our collective capabilities to deliver upon our mission of championing financial progress for all. Mint is going away, and we have phased communications and user migration by design so the product team can ensure a smooth transition for Minters who decide to onboard to Credit Karma.”
More information here:
How I Have Used the Mint Budgeting App
There are many different ways to use Mint, and I personally have used Mint for more than a decade. I have enjoyed the ability to track all of my transactions. I have many different bank accounts and credit cards, and Mint has been a great place to safely and securely monitor all of my spending, no matter which card I've used. Mint allows you to connect all your accounts and view transactions in one convenient dashboard.
Mint also offers a comprehensive budgeting platform, where you can set a budget in various spending categories and track your monthly spending in each category. That can be helpful as you plan throughout the month. Getting a notification that you are approaching your total budget when the month is only half over can help you adjust your spending. While I personally used Mint primarily at Mint.com, Mint is also available (for now) with the iOS and Android apps.
Why the Disappearance of Mint Is a Problem
Intuit's announcement of Mint going away (err . . . “being reimagined”) has the potential to be a big problem for many households that have used it for years to track and budget their finances. While you can continue to use Intuit's Credit Karma or look at Mint alternatives (which we'll cover in a minute), any friction in the budgeting process runs the risk of mistakes or errors slipping into things. After all, when you “put your finances on autopilot,” what happens when the autopilot goes away?
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The Hidden Cost of “Free” Budgeting Tools
Before we talk about some of the Mint alternatives out there, it's important also to understand the concept of TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). Mint was free to use (though there was also a Mint Premium version), while many of the Mint alternatives charge a one-time or recurring fee.
Whether paying for a budgeting tool will make sense for you will depend on your specific situation, but understand that even free budgeting tools come with a cost. Some free budgeting tools make money by selling your data to advertisers. That may be an acceptable tradeoff for you—it's just important to understand that this is happening and to make the decision that makes you most comfortable.
Best Mint Budgeting App Alternatives
Now that Mint is scheduled to go away in early 2024, you have a couple of Mint alternatives to consider. Here's a look at a few of them:
- Credit Karma – The simplest path will be to continue with Intuit. You can migrate the last three years of your Mint data over to Credit Karma. As Intuit said when it announced Mint would be closed: “Credit Karma is on its way to becoming a full-service financial platform where we take stock of members’ financial profiles, connect the dots for members, and identify saving opportunities to act on, at the right time.”
- YNAB – Formerly You Need A Budget, YNAB has somewhat of a cult following among personal finance enthusiasts. It also offers practical advice on how to rethink how you approach money. YNAB costs $14.99 per month or $99 annually.
- Rocket Money – One of the unique features of Rocket Money is a subscription management service that helps you cancel monthly services that you're no longer using. There is a free tier, but Rocket Money Premium costs $4-$5 per month when billed annually.
- Quicken Simplifi – A budgeting and financial tracking tool from Quicken, Simplifi costs $3.99 per month, and it's offering a three-month free trial for Mint users.
- Empower – Formerly known as Personal Capital, Empower is a good option to track your cash flow and portfolio, particularly if you wish to view your investments across all of your accounts to better understand your overall portfolio makeup.
- Monarch — Another Mint alternative is Monarch Money. Monarch claims to sync with more financial accounts than any other competitor—which allows you to more easily pull in your transactions, no matter where they are. Plus, Monarch has Mint import tools to move all your Mint data, and you can use code MINT50 to get 50% off your first year and a 30-day free trial.
- Just use a spreadsheet – If you never used some of the more advanced budgeting features of Mint, you could be OK by just using an Excel or Google Spreadsheet.
No matter which tool you use, Mint has promised the ability to download all of your past and existing Mint transactions.
The Bottom Line
Intuit has recently announced that powerhouse financial tracking and budgeting tool Mint will be going away in early 2024. If you are a long-term Mint user (like I am), it's now time to start looking for a new home for your finances. There are several different alternatives. But remember that each comes with its own pros and cons. Either way, having a way to look at your financial picture is important. As we've written before, “If you don’t track where your money comes from and where it goes, it’s like driving a ship blindfolded . . . It may work OK for a while, but you’re bound to run into trouble eventually.”
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Do you use Mint? How disappointing is it that it won't be available for much longer? What are you going to do now? Comment below!
While mint used to be helpful for budgeting years ago, I’m at the point where I just use it as an easy way to track my total portfolio value. Though it has also been helpful with searching for transactions when needed at tax time. It wouldn’t be that much more effort to log into 4 different accounts and add up the totals. So I’m probably going to just see how the Credit Karma change is going to roll out since it won’t require much effort to opt in. And if I don’t like it then I’ll just cancel it and check my balances the old fashioned way.
Lunch Money is a good paid alternative that is being actively developed and supported. No investment portfolio tracking though.
Tiller is another alternative for people who like spreadsheets. It pulls all your data into a transaction sheet (Google Sheets or excel, the excel support is newer, and I haven’t used it, so I can’t speak to how that works), and there are a bunch of great pre built template sheets for various things, but you can also build your own, if you like. It’s not free, but not expensive, I think about $60/year. They’re currently creating “moving to tiller from mint” content to help people transition, too. I get nothing for shilling for them, I’ve just been happy with their product and service for years and was surprised it wasn’t on the list.
BY FAR the best budgeting app imo is Copilot. Haven’t looked back after trying nearly all the rest.
Mint’s most unique features seem to be around importing all spending (including the Apple Card that sadly no one else can do from what I’ve found), and then leveraging that spending info for categorizing, and budgeting.
For me it’s been a really powerful tool to just go find transactions – for example if I want to find all medical or dental for FSA/HSA, or all donations for taxes.
For tracking investments there seems to be lots of other tools that cover that well – Empower as an obvious free one.
I’ll probably try Empower and Monarch, but without Apple Card support anything will be practically useless for transaction tracking .
This suck so bad. I have 13 years worth of every expense in Mint. I so wish they had just charged me monthly fee. I would have happily paid it. I don’t personally use the budgeting (I look at spending trends) or portfolio tracking (spreadsheet better), but the expense tracking is invaluable. We are lucky enough to have significant disposable income but need to track of all those credit cards, fees and checks. Monitoring in one place is some much easier that logging into a dozen different bank and CC sites.
If any of you using the other options could chime in if your solution can do a good job at the following I’d owe you several beers or coffees. I heard Lunch Money, Copiplot, Tiller, YNAB etc.
* I use the graphing of spending by category quarterly to see where money is going. I can drill into each pie slice down to the transaction level to fix things that are miscategorized.
* I can tag some transactions to not be in summaries. This is useful to remove large cash purchases like cars or qtr tax payments which throws off month to month monitoring.
* I can look up stuff like how much have I spent on my 3 year remodel or my surgery/rehab spanning 2 years. Useful for when you go to sell the house or manage you HSA.
* I am able to look across transactions from multiple credit cards and spot fraudulent charges easily
* I can easily find old transactions even if I don’t remember the payee using search. I can tell you when a subscription went up in price or what I spent to paint the house 5 years ago.
* Ideally you could log into something on Mac, PC or phone
* Mint import would be HUGE plus
Thanks everyone….. except Intuit… grrrrrr
That’s exactly the kind of thing I use it for and for some reason none of the other blogs or YouTube videos have really focussed on those points. Perhaps because they’re the wealthier demographic user’s priorities.
I’ve so far learned that Monarch might be the closest but haven’t yet tried it. Not having Apple Card import is a deal breaker for me
We switched to Monarch. There’s some limits, but they report a 20x user base increase last month. This is a good problem, incentive to add features for those Mint users. They’ve been emailing updates and plans because of this change.
1. I’ve use Mint a long time, pre-Intuit days. One of Mint founders manages Monarch, I feel I can trust them.
2. Haven’t tried adding Apple Card, but those transactions are so few and small part of my budget, not a deal breaker.
3. After reading more comments, maybe I should adapt to different system. Will look at simplifi too.
After using Mint for 12+ years, I was crushed to hear it was shutting down. I tried a handful of these alternatives, and Simplifi has become my favorite. It’s one of the cheaper options and it does what I need – mainly expense tracking and trending. And get this, it’s so much better than Mint was with breaking down actual income, monthly bills / subscriptions, and planned spending. Makes much more intuitive sense. I just wish I had switched to it earlier. Been using it for just over a month now and now I realize all the shortcomings Mint had.
This is from the perspective of transaction aggregation and reporting, if you care about budgets or investment tracking you have a different set of criteria. I am currently trying out Monarch and Simplifi. They both have drawbacks. I am in communication with their staff to see if either of them plan on addressing these issues. I really want to have visibility on 30k Mint transactions through importing.
Monarch:
* Seems like I can import and maintain my categories but there is poor Trends/Charting of past data. This could be addressed by future updates so I could possibly wait.
* A big negative for me is how much effort it takes to edit transactions. All the features are there but it’s cumbersome and take too many clicks and popups. I do hundreds per month so this is a pain point.
Simplifi:
* Currently doesn’t import categories for your old Mint data. I suppose I could at least look up old transactions but I can’t chart spending by category over time. I have a conversation going with support on this. He said they “actually do” import categories if they are Mint default categories but they don’t have custom categories worked out yet and so they don’t show them at all. He said they are working on it. I have asked if it makes more sense to hold the data for a future import. I also asked if I could pay for a custom import. I am waiting to hear.
* Transaction editing and charting is very similar to Mint, so I like it.
Both services imported my Chase, Wells Fargo and CapitalOne data fine at least for test. If you’re like me at all, please send their respective support teams notes on these deficiencies and this may drive development.
At this point my plan maybe download my data to safe keeping, start out with Simplifi in January since it does what I need. I can always import my old data to Simplifi later or import old data (+ a year of Simplifi) over to Monarch if things improve in the reporting and UI.
I used it for the same since 2007. Expense importing, categorization, and trend tracking (net worth, spending by category, etc). I’d happily pay to continue using it, but will probably export/screenshot everything at the end of December, then see what Cedit Karma looks like and maybe give Monarch a trial.
I’m really hoping that Credit Karma will categorize spending like Mint does. Like you, I no longer use the current month budget functions of Mint, but I’m addicted to tracking my year over year spending by category. It sounds like CK might pick up this skill. Let’s hope so!
Empower (Personal Capital) has been much better for investment/portfolio tracking, but their categorization of credit card charges is not nearly as good as Mint’s. That said, I think Mint became markedly worse at their automated categorization several years ago – around the Intuit takeover…
I have used YNAB on and off for over 20 years—and would highly recommend it. I have used it nearly exclusively for the past couple years for both budgeting and NW tracking. I did use Mint as well for over a decade, but largely gave up on it as a budgeting tool.
YNAB works well for the family and integrates well with the “Making your money matter” spreadsheet package for long-term forecasting and tax planning, which I have also been using since early 2021. I re-vamped my YNAB budget using the recommended categories—and then created a simple macro in google sheets to easily copy and paste the monthly data in the right format for MYMM after exporting from YNAB.
I recently discovered the YNAB Toolkit add on, which is simply amazing for drilling down on spending categories and trends, and correcting any mistakes in categorizing transactions.
Correction: I was still using Quicken and spreadsheets 20 years ago. I have been using YNAB (YNAB 4 and subsequent iterations) for at least 8 years.
Would you say the “Making Your Money Matter” spreadsheet is worth the cost? I’ve been eyeing it for a while, but haven’t been able to justify it.
If you like YNAB, I’d also suggest checking out Actual Budget. I moved over a couple years ago. It’s all local so it’s a lot faster and setup similar to YNAB4.
MYMM is absolutely worth it IMO. it was about 100 when I bought it, but even $145 now for a well-organized, comprehensive and customizable package with no recurring cost at less than an hour of my time is a bargain. It would probably have taken dozens of hours to build it out myself. You do need to be good with spreadsheets—or willing to learn to use them.
Besides seeing the various tax calculations, I have found the social security calculator current and future projected earned benefits (with bend points) most useful. I added a sheet of my own to calculate my pension. Also helpful to see projected balances for my TSP, Roth, HSA and brokerage accounts. The amortization schedules are convenient as well.
I modified her emergency fund calculations to reflect tiered EF (e.g. savings bonds, brokerage accounts, HSA, Roth, etc) which makes more sense to me than just cash.
Kathryn did a nice job with the taxable vs. Roth vs tax-deferred optimization of investments, but that’s not really useful to me as most of our financial assets are in tax-advantaged accounts (and I already understand tax optimization of assets).
Some of the package is less helpful. Why would I need to track my credit scores? They have been consistently excellent. But you can take what is useful and ignore what isn’t.
I highly suggest Monarch. I’ve been using it for about 2 years now!
Rocketmoney was my choice, I’m so glad I found it. It was the most like mint, and it does other things quite well like managing recurring charges.
I looked at various apps and have found that Pocketguard is the most similar to Mint.
I have been using Quicken for 20 years. It’s primarily a desktop application, but does have decent mobile and web access. It is able to import Apple Credit Card transactions using the export transactions share button in the Apple Card app in the iPhone. You select QFX for the file format.
This is a core service offered by many financial planners and advisors like myself through eMoney owned by Fidelity. Robust and ad free, but as stated, no free lunch since you have to pay the advisor fee 🙂
The best feature of Mint in my opinion was that it was free and automated. All these options I’m sure are great, but as a resident I’m not ready to add on another monthly expense so I switched to Nerd Wallet. They have a budgeting app that has lots of similar features as Mint such as categorizing transactions automatically, tracking monthly trends like, cash flow, and net worth. It’s of course not as great as mint, but gets the job done.