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Best App for Budgeting?
With the imminent demise of Mint.com, one of the biggest budgeting app/website is going to disappear. What's a good alternative?
- dave84 3y agoHappy YNAB user here.
- willmeyers 3y agoI've been using Copilot (not to be confused for GitHub Copilot) for past 6/7 months. I really like the Mac and iPhone apps. I'm still trying it out so I'm paying $13/month right now, but I'll most likely pay for the yearly subscription.
- dedzycide 3y agoGoogle Sheets. I stopped using random apps for budgeting, too unreliable.
- foxandmouse 3y agoOne thing I didn't realize before signing up for these apps is that it voids the fraud protection offered by your bank. Since then I've switched back to a spreadsheet and couldn't be happier. There's plenty of great templates to start from on reddit personal finance subreddits.
- syncbehind 3y agoCan...you elaborate on this?
- Jtsummers 3y agoMint and others used to (still do? I haven't used any of these things in over a decade) take your username/password and sometimes even security questions and then use screen scraping to get transactions and balances and such. This was (is?) because many banks and CC companies didn't have proper APIs or access tokens that could offer limited access. The result was that Mint and others could, in theory, initiate transactions as you. Naturally, banks and others said, "Don't do that, and if you do you're going to lose some of your protections because you're willfully giving away your credentials."
- syncbehind 3y agoOh wow, no idea. But that's definitely a big red flag.
- foxandmouse 3y agoSame, I was shocked when I found out, I only registered for mint recently and there was no warning in the sign up process.
- philomath_mn 3y ago> voids the fraud protection offered by your bank I am guessing this depends on how you connect your bank to the app? If you just hand over plaintext username/password, maybe you don't get protections. But most apps use a service like Plaid which should limit permissions to read-only.
- billybuckwheat 3y agoA simple spreadsheet. No use making the process any more complicated and stressful than it needs to be. Here's a not-bad article on getting started: https://opensource.com/article/17/8/budget-libreoffice-calc https://opensource.com/article/17/8/budget-libreoffice-calc And one that describes something a bit more complex: https://opensource.com/article/20/3/libreoffice-open-source-budget https://opensource.com/article/20/3/libreoffice-open-source-...
- ninjha01 3y agoI use and like rocket money
- v1l 3y agoI don't "budget" in the traditional sense of the word. Tried using these apps for a long time and they are either too complex or don't give me what I want. I look at income and spend post-facto by once-a-month pulling in statements from my bank, card, and any other spend accounts (like venmo). I wrote a simple app to analyze this on a month-to-month basis.