5 ms·

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 indi

by koboll 7y ago

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 The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship.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 Plaid's been around just as long.

eegilbert 7y ago
That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.
- illegalsmile 7y ago
  I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
  - rollerboi 7y ago
    I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on. But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
  - jimcsharp 7y ago
    YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.
  - bostonvaulter2 7y ago
    What does bug me is being forced to store all my data on their servers. I'm sticking to v4 until I'm forced onto something else (or I build my own replacement)
  - ian_d 7y ago
    I'd go check the YNAB forums, there's a lot of v4 users who really hate the cloud version. I tried to switch and gave it up for two reasons: - Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over". - You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-only-one-months-income https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...). - No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time. The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.
    - stmpjmpr 7y ago
      Longtime YNAB user here. It was rough moving to nYNAB at first, and I missed features for awhile. It's generally caught up and surpassed YNAB 4 in most respects. Things I still miss: the red right arrow (good reason to abandon it, but I still liked it), and being able to see three months side-by-side. Starting over occasionally is not a bad thing, IMO, and I did a fresh start with nYNAB. I created a "Next Month's Income" category, and use it exactly like YNAB 4; I don't budget beyond the current month. It woekd just fine that way. I generally ignore "Age of Money", which took over as the "Live on Last Month's Income" rule, and still follow the latter.
    - baumandm 7y ago
      I don't think your 2nd bullet is completely true, although I don't think it's the same as how it worked in v4. You can receive income in January, then switch to February and allocate it to a category. When you switch back to January, it will not show that money in your To Be Budgeted total. So you can zero out January while having the next month already budgeted for. My system is to switch to the next month, select all categories, then click the "Budgeted Last Month" button to automatically apply my previous budget to that month. Then I switch back to the current month and fix any underfunded categories and allocate any overflows to get the balance down to zero.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I've had a Mint account almost since launch. I've tried multiple times over the years to pick up YNAB. Last week I started taking another stab at it. The two aren't quite equivalent. YNAB seems to pretty actively want you to "Fresh Start." One of the giant values for me with Mint is historical information. I often will dump a CSV or troll through old transactions since I can't remember which account was used. After not touching Mint for a year I could go through and touch up categories and answer if "eating out" was something I'm doing more of in Nov/Dec than January. Or I could skim through and mark deductions when filing taxes or looking for medical expenses. My needs have changed a lot since I was clawing out of debt. I don't really see myself setting a budget, but more tracking categories to find outliers. I guess kind of like changing my diet instead of trying to make my next meal "healthy." That said, I'd love to ditch Mint. There are so many ads garbaging up the interface. I never found their charts all that useful. Their offers seem to be whoever bought ad space this month instead of what would improve my financial situation. YNAB is way better at things like bi-montly bills that use income split up each month.
dbbk 7y ago
Lots of these exist. I pay for PocketSmith.
sciurus 7y ago
Try Personal Capital (https://www.personalcapital.com/ https://www.personalcapital.com/). I used Mint for years but jumped ship about 6 months ago and am glad I did so.
- basch 7y ago
  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.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    Export it to excel / sheets and don't look back. I started doing this a while ago because Mint only tracks the maximum account value for a particular month and doesn't let you modify historical data. So once or twice a year, something with an account would change and I'd end up with a month with a 70% or something jump in net worth which would drop off the next month. Plus, you can do projections with excel.
- dionidium 7y ago
  I agree with you; Personal Capital is very good. I use both. But they aren't interchangeable. Personal Capital is pretty good for tracking investments and net worth, but Mint is much better at budgeting and tracking monthly expenses.
  - sciurus 7y ago
    I disagree. I find the budgeting to be equal (although I don't use it much in either) and personal capital to be better at tracking expenses. Both can categorize and analyze equally as well, but personal capital also has a nice cash flow view that mint lacks.
sithlord 7y ago
Personal Capital is free, works amazingly - not really a budgeting tool - but more an aggregating tool. Depends what you want to use it for, it does have some* budgeting capabilities.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- andreyk 7y ago
  +1 for Personal Capital, I used to use Mint but hated how buggy it was, Personal Capital has worked like a charm and I think their UI is great
- ausjke 7y ago
  +1 for personal capital, a bug free Mint basically
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Bank of America does it for free: https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-online-banking-features/spending-budgeting/ https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli... I run all of my spending through BoA credit cards / checking accounts, and they automatically categorize 99% of transactions and there's a nice little report of the last 12 months. It also incorporates Merrill data, and you can add other companies' logins to so BoA can import those transactions too, but I'm not a fan of giving out login information.
- Shebanator 7y ago
  Its not just BofA - Amex does a great job of classifying your transactions and giving you monthly and yearly reports on your spending. Other banks with "premium" credit cards do similar things.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I'm sure many do, others in the thread have noted USAA and PNC. Doesn't seem like a hard thing to implement.
bcraven 7y ago
It's more UK-centric perhaps, but I've had a great time with Money Dashboard[0] for tagging and multiple-accounts overview. The In/Out chart is great for checking that I'm not spending too much each month. [0] https://www.moneydashboard.com/ https://www.moneydashboard.com/ [0.1] affiliate: https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ
aaronax 7y ago
It's old school, but I use Quicken. It works fine and it's less than $5/month.
jnfr 7y ago
Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app 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.
- afterwalk 7y ago
  How do you guys do the importing? (Specifically do you use a bank API service such as plaid?)
  - tristor 7y ago
    I'm unsure if this is still the case, but they relied entirely on Plaid when I tried it. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, however Plaid doesn't support some of my most critical accounts. In the end, this is why I had to stop using Lunch Money.
idrism 7y ago
Co-founder of Truebill here. Try Truebill! And let me know what you think.
shaklee3 7y ago
Wealthfront is great as well. The projections are far better than anything else I've seen.

by koboll 7y ago

eegilbert 7y ago

That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.

illegalsmile 7y ago
I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
- rollerboi 7y ago
  I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on. But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
- jimcsharp 7y ago
  YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.
- bostonvaulter2 7y ago
  What does bug me is being forced to store all my data on their servers. I'm sticking to v4 until I'm forced onto something else (or I build my own replacement)
- ian_d 7y ago
  I'd go check the YNAB forums, there's a lot of v4 users who really hate the cloud version. I tried to switch and gave it up for two reasons: - Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over". - You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-only-one-months-income https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...). - No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time. The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.
  - stmpjmpr 7y ago
    Longtime YNAB user here. It was rough moving to nYNAB at first, and I missed features for awhile. It's generally caught up and surpassed YNAB 4 in most respects. Things I still miss: the red right arrow (good reason to abandon it, but I still liked it), and being able to see three months side-by-side. Starting over occasionally is not a bad thing, IMO, and I did a fresh start with nYNAB. I created a "Next Month's Income" category, and use it exactly like YNAB 4; I don't budget beyond the current month. It woekd just fine that way. I generally ignore "Age of Money", which took over as the "Live on Last Month's Income" rule, and still follow the latter.
  - baumandm 7y ago
    I don't think your 2nd bullet is completely true, although I don't think it's the same as how it worked in v4. You can receive income in January, then switch to February and allocate it to a category. When you switch back to January, it will not show that money in your To Be Budgeted total. So you can zero out January while having the next month already budgeted for. My system is to switch to the next month, select all categories, then click the "Budgeted Last Month" button to automatically apply my previous budget to that month. Then I switch back to the current month and fix any underfunded categories and allocate any overflows to get the balance down to zero.
pfranz 7y ago
I've had a Mint account almost since launch. I've tried multiple times over the years to pick up YNAB. Last week I started taking another stab at it. The two aren't quite equivalent. YNAB seems to pretty actively want you to "Fresh Start." One of the giant values for me with Mint is historical information. I often will dump a CSV or troll through old transactions since I can't remember which account was used. After not touching Mint for a year I could go through and touch up categories and answer if "eating out" was something I'm doing more of in Nov/Dec than January. Or I could skim through and mark deductions when filing taxes or looking for medical expenses. My needs have changed a lot since I was clawing out of debt. I don't really see myself setting a budget, but more tracking categories to find outliers. I guess kind of like changing my diet instead of trying to make my next meal "healthy." That said, I'd love to ditch Mint. There are so many ads garbaging up the interface. I never found their charts all that useful. Their offers seem to be whoever bought ad space this month instead of what would improve my financial situation. YNAB is way better at things like bi-montly bills that use income split up each month.

dbbk 7y ago

Lots of these exist. I pay for PocketSmith.

sciurus 7y ago

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

basch 7y ago
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.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Export it to excel / sheets and don't look back. I started doing this a while ago because Mint only tracks the maximum account value for a particular month and doesn't let you modify historical data. So once or twice a year, something with an account would change and I'd end up with a month with a 70% or something jump in net worth which would drop off the next month. Plus, you can do projections with excel.
dionidium 7y ago
I agree with you; Personal Capital is very good. I use both. But they aren't interchangeable. Personal Capital is pretty good for tracking investments and net worth, but Mint is much better at budgeting and tracking monthly expenses.
- sciurus 7y ago
  I disagree. I find the budgeting to be equal (although I don't use it much in either) and personal capital to be better at tracking expenses. Both can categorize and analyze equally as well, but personal capital also has a nice cash flow view that mint lacks.

sithlord 7y ago

Personal Capital is free, works amazingly - not really a budgeting tool - but more an aggregating tool. Depends what you want to use it for, it does have some* budgeting capabilities.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
andreyk 7y ago
+1 for Personal Capital, I used to use Mint but hated how buggy it was, Personal Capital has worked like a charm and I think their UI is great
ausjke 7y ago
+1 for personal capital, a bug free Mint basically

lotsofpulp 7y ago

Bank of America does it for free: https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-online-banking-features/spending-budgeting/ https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli... I run all of my spending through BoA credit cards / checking accounts, and they automatically categorize 99% of transactions and there's a nice little report of the last 12 months. It also incorporates Merrill data, and you can add other companies' logins to so BoA can import those transactions too, but I'm not a fan of giving out login information.

Shebanator 7y ago
Its not just BofA - Amex does a great job of classifying your transactions and giving you monthly and yearly reports on your spending. Other banks with "premium" credit cards do similar things.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  I'm sure many do, others in the thread have noted USAA and PNC. Doesn't seem like a hard thing to implement.

bcraven 7y ago

It's more UK-centric perhaps, but I've had a great time with Money Dashboard[0] for tagging and multiple-accounts overview. The In/Out chart is great for checking that I'm not spending too much each month. [0] https://www.moneydashboard.com/ https://www.moneydashboard.com/ [0.1] affiliate: https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ

aaronax 7y ago

It's old school, but I use Quicken. It works fine and it's less than $5/month.

jnfr 7y ago

Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app 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.

afterwalk 7y ago
How do you guys do the importing? (Specifically do you use a bank API service such as plaid?)
- tristor 7y ago
  I'm unsure if this is still the case, but they relied entirely on Plaid when I tried it. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, however Plaid doesn't support some of my most critical accounts. In the end, this is why I had to stop using Lunch Money.

idrism 7y ago

Co-founder of Truebill here. Try Truebill! And let me know what you think.

shaklee3 7y ago

Wealthfront is great as well. The projections are far better than anything else I've seen.