
What happened to Mint? - vontzy
https://www.fastcompany.com/90453586/what-the-hell-happened-to-mint
======
Ozzie_osman
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 make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else
that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product
that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-
the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products.

This also explains a lot of the problems with the internet at large
today—misaligned business models. I'd definitely encourage anyone joining (or
starting) a company to think about what the revenue model they are choosing
means for the product and company long-term. Every company will say they are
different, and that they actually care about their users and about building a
good product... and maybe in the early days, the original team can stay true
to that, but eventually time and money take their toll.

Companies that really want to build lovable, user-aligned products, set up a
revenue model that encourages them to stick to that long term.

[1] [https://www.monarchmoney.com](https://www.monarchmoney.com) [2]
[https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-
turbotax-20-year-f...](https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-
turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free)

~~~
koboll
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The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated,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.

~~~
sithlord
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.

~~~
andreyk
+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

------
creade
One of my longest standing mint mysteries is how I alone was A/B tested into
them trying to bum pizza off me:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSg_ZxLU8AAF96d?format=png&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSg_ZxLU8AAF96d?format=png&name=medium)

I haven't been able to find any other confirmation that this was a thing
outside the one time I saw it.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
That sounds like a April Fool's joke. Or maybe they saw you are a billionaire
pizza entrepreneur?

~~~
coldpie
I think it's just an awkward way to write $5, $15, and $30.

------
awicz
I switched to [https://ynab.com](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.

~~~
LegitShady
I couldn't handle the forced system in ynab - it's clunky and I want a budget
program not a whole new budget system. To me less useful than an excel budget
because it tries to force you to do things it's way.

I'd rather use Excel than be forced to use their stupid system.

~~~
paulgb
You might like Tiller Money. It's basically the bank integration that Mint and
YNAB have, but instead of being forced to use their interface it backs out the
data into an Excel/Google spreadsheet that you can build your own system on
top of. (It costs money, but after what happened to Mint I consider
"sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling your data" a feature
for this sort of service.)

~~~
andrewzah
Only allowing logins via google is highly disappointing, and makes tiller
unusable for me.

The last thing I want to associate with my google account is my financial
data.

~~~
mendelk
While I can understand not wanting to create a Google account (even just to
use as a login), my understanding is that if you use Tiller via Excel, Google
will not have access to any of your financial data.

------
brownbat
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 spending habits is supposed to be
extremely valuable, they can't afford to fix the product, and this is the best
we can get.

~~~
matmann2001
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?

~~~
basch
Cant you tell it "always categorize"

~~~
delecti
You can tell it, it won't necessarily work.

I've recategorized a certain transaction pattern and marked it "always
categorize" every paycheck for several months.

------
ineedasername
My impression of Intuit's acquisition of Mint was always that it was done
precisely so that it _wouldn 't_ grow and become a major player in personal
finance. That what they were really purchasing was the Mint userbase in an
attempt to cross sell them on paid products. And so they have kept Mint around
with the absolute bare minimum of effort for the sales funnel through to
revenue generating products

~~~
cfitz
I have this same impression, but I also use Mint to organize my finances.

I'm a big fan of how I can categorize expenditures and export them as CSV's or
charts, which I can then send to my accountant for an easy tax season.

Without this (so far) free tool - as I have not paid for anything Intuit
related minus likely my personal data - my annual U.S. taxes would be a
massive pain in the rear end, being that I'm self-employed.

~~~
ineedasername
I use Wave, free accounting tool that has ledger and account-driven structure
(i.e., you set, say a "Software" account, perhaps with a sub account of
"subscription" etc.) I was able to use it to setup the exact structure I
needed to categorize expenses/revenue to correspond to my Schedule C every
year. Connects to credit cards and bank accounts to capture all of those
transactions too. It's been extremely useful for me, though I'm not sure how
long that will continue: They were purchased by H&R Block this past year.

------
ghostpepper
The killer feature I am waiting for is any site or app with automatic
transaction importing from my bank without requiring me to input my online
banking password and thus being one data breach away from someone having full
access to all my accounts (sms-based 2FA notwithstanding)

This is a solved problem in tech (OAuth, I think) so clearly there are
perverse financial incentives (ie. my bank doesn't want to make it easy to me
to export my data)

Does anyone know what would have to happen to make this possible? My bank is
in Canada, if that matters.

~~~
peter303
Or a financial institution could create read-only accounts with no permission
to transfer any money anywhere. Besides fintech apps, these are useful for
guardians of young or elderly to monitor them. Or when I am traveling in an
area with untrustworthy wireless or cellular and want to see if a transaction
cleared.

Fidelity Brokerage has this kind of account.

~~~
shkkmo
The issue is that many banks treat "read access" as a piece of verifying info
that can give full account access.

------
djstein
Just going to post a great alternative that people over at
[http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/](http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/)
recommend Personal Capital
[http://personalcapital.com/](http://personalcapital.com/)

I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've
used in a long time

~~~
mrpotato
> Just going to post a great alternative

To clarify, personal capital is for US residents

From their support page:

>Although you can access the Personal Capital application from any location,
we currently only support U.S based financial institutions (currency, USD) for
linking accounts. Note that for security reasons, you will need a valid U.S.
phone number to sign up for Personal Capital.

[https://support.personalcapital.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201169...](https://support.personalcapital.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201169680-Can-I-link-an-international-account-in-Personal-
Capital-)

~~~
jyrkesh
"For security reasons" is laughable.

They want your phone number because their "advisors" blow up your phone every
month or two trying to get you to use their financial services (which I'll
never do). They also like telling me in the UI that I'm "not putting enough of
my money" to work or some BS, just cause I like having a little nest egg.

That being said, it's a massively useful tool. I'll gladly let my Pixel spam
filter their calls every couple months in return for being able to track my
net worth and investments so easily.

~~~
maxioatic
I can confirm they will blow up your phone. I went through with their sales
pitch once (didn't buy) and afterwards they stopped calling.

I use it in addition to Mint actually. Mint for tracking spending and PC for
macro view, like net worth/investments. I recommend Personal Capital for this
as well.

------
lxe
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 place.

Everything else I really don't care about. Even if there's on interface and
just a big "Export to CSV" button I'd be thrilled about it.

~~~
3JPLW
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.

~~~
apearson
It you’re just using it to get data into Google Sheets then you should
checkout [https://Tillerhq.com](https://Tillerhq.com)

------
mherdeg
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 spend against an easily mutable budget.

In fact it was so easy to use that for a good long while I found myself
manually entering cash receipts and even tracking my cash purchases. And it
cost $0. It felt better than Quicken for personal finance.

Maybe I have missed some major innovation in personal finance software -- I
largely use Mint and home-grown spreadsheets now, and I keep hearing that
people use paid tools like YNAB or free complementary-to-the-company's-real-
job tools like the Personal Capital suite -- but this all feels like it's
worse now.

~~~
Ididntdothis
Totally agree. Microsoft Money was close to perfect sometime in the 2000s. I
am really sad that it got abandoned.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Presumably it still runs, do the integrations with banks no longer work?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Last time I tried no. If I remember correctly one bank after the other
abandoned OFX.

~~~
Chirael
What did they abandon it for, QBO?

~~~
Ididntdothis
I think for nothing. Are there any desktop programs that allow you to pull
bank data without scraping?

------
pxlpshr
I use Personal Capital and love it. It's just better when you have a variety
of 15+ assets and supports things like Carta. Admittedly, it's been a long
time since I used Mint but I now need a much broader view. I don't really care
about my individual transactions; I'm more focused on turning a different set
of knobs at this point in life.

My biggest complaint about Personal Capital is the frequent phone calls from
their financial advisors despite asking them to stop. I'd be happy to pay $10+
a month just for their aggregation services but my private bank is leaps ahead
in terms of sophistication and access to alternative investments not typically
available to the public.

~~~
gk1
Their sales calls are the reason I deleted my PC account and (reluctantly)
returned to Mint. I, too, would be willing to pay some small subscription
amount.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
Same experience here. Tried to switch from Mint to PC, got like 5 calls from
them in the first week or so, cursed the caller out over the phone on the
fifth one, and then immediately deleted my account after. It's predatory and
it completely destroyed any trust I reluctantly gave them in the first place.

I really wish there were self-hosted options for seeing all of your finances
in a single spot. Even paid options. That's what I really want.

------
crazygringo
I dunno... I kind of _like_ the fact it hasn't changed.

I've been using it for years. It does what it needs to do, and literally
_nothing_ else.

Most of the charts and graphs work fine. It seems to be specifically the
investment ones that require Flash, which is a bummer. Honestly I'd never used
them before, so hadn't even noticed.

But in contrast to other software that completely overhauls its interface
(usually for the worse) every few years, and turns into slower and slower
bloatware... I guess it's kind of refreshing to me that Mint _hasn 't_
changed... knock on wood.

------
sugarpile
I've been using [https://lunchmoney.app/](https://lunchmoney.app/) since it
launched. On top of being one of the cleaner saas apps I use the developer has
been super responsive whenever I've submitted feedback or feature requests.
It's the first budgeting/expense tracking app I've ever actually stuck with
which I attribute to the aforementioned "cleanness"/usability. Genuine +1 from
me (and I'm not even including my referral link)

~~~
metalliqaz
Does it ingest transaction data from all major credit cards like Mint can? It
only says "banks" on the landing page.

~~~
yohannparis
The data comes from plaid.com, so take a look.

------
decasia
It sounds like the answer is pretty straightforward — Mint was acquired and
then semi-abandoned for want of providing sufficient revenue/having a
sufficiently profitable business model.

The question in my mind is: What is the matter with global banking
institutions such that this has to be a third party service instead of a
service that a well-organized banking consortium could provide to its clients?
I would totally switch my checking account if it came with a good Mint clone.

Is it asking so much for an interface from my bank that can classify
transactions, include basic budgeting features, and pull in some data from
other accounts?

(I know, I know, it's one of those things that sounds like a pretty simple
CRUD app until you look into any of the industry-specific technical details.)

~~~
shaunparker
USAA's checking/savings accounts have most of those features. You can connect
external bank and investment accounts. Track home value. Categorize
transactions. There's more features, those are just the ones I know about.
That said, I still use Personal Capital to track my finances.

~~~
windthrown
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer Personal Capital to USAA?

~~~
shaunparker
I think @Richicoder is right. USAA's tools haven't been updated in a while and
are a pain to use. Their tech is still really good for a US bank. Personal
Capital has been pretty painless (besides the occasional bank/investment
syncing issues). Personal Capital's investment and retirement tools are quite
nice. The only downside to Personal Capital is their advisors calling to try
and sell their service. I eventually blocked their numbers and haven't heard
anything from them in years.

A long time ago I used Mint. If I remember correctly, I had tons of syncing
issues and problems navigating their UI. I tried USAA for a while, but
eventually stumbled upon Personal Capital. I passionately dislike Intuit due
to their pricing practices of Quickbooks Online, so I'd never use Mint again
;)

~~~
windthrown
That makes sense and I hope we do see USAA’s tools get a refresh in the
future. From a security and privacy perspective, I feel much more comfortable
giving USAA access to my accounts/transactions compared to the assortment of
budgeting/expense FinTech companies.

------
sct202
Mint is still useful even though the core features have been basically
unchanged for the last decade, but that said I've been de-linking accounts
from my Mint because they don't synchronize right or fail a bunch. I've mostly
degraded it to just being for spending tracking and it seems reliable at
connecting to Chase.

~~~
josefresco
Same here. The frequent "you need to reconnect your account" notices were
annoying, and often times just ignoring them fixed the issue.

I went from tracking just one credit card, to tracking all my accounts, and
now back to just one credit card.

------
josefresco
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 never worked.

Last year I tried adding _all_ my financial accounts, but it fell flat on it's
face and never resolved the issue I had with double reporting (despite Mint
knowing _everything_ about my financial world).

I recently pulled all my accounts and added back only my primary credit card.
I'll now use it only for the occasional "gotcha" such as a bank fee, double
transaction or unrecognized transaction. I no longer am interested in fixing
miscategorization.

~~~
tguedes
Idk why it didn't work for you but I have both my bank account and credit card
on mint and like you I pay it off fully each month. Each transaction on my
credit card shows on my budget.

When I pay off my credit card, a transaction shows up on the credit card side,
say +$1000, I put this is Credit Card Payment. Since I have my bank account
also in Mint, another transaction of -$1000 comes my bank account and I put
this in Credit Card Payment, so it cancels out.

I've done this enough that I no longer have to do it manually.

~~~
josefresco
Yeah I have no clue. I performed those same steps but it never seemed to
reflect on the budgets and income/debt reports. I've tried a half a dozen
times to sort these and other issues out, and I've simply given up.

------
orev
I had been using PocketMoney for a very long time, but it was recently
destroyed by the company that acquired it. Seriously looking into GNUCash to
try to avoid that kind of thing in the future.

Using an online service for financial tracking seems crazy to me, given the
data free-for-all that is going on now.

~~~
benplumley
I've been using YNAB4 for about 5 years, when it eventually stops working I'm
planning to move to Eqonomize[1] - it's GPL so should avoid your concern, but
isn't quite as drastic a jump as GNUCash, and it's cross-platform too.

[1] [http://eqonomize.github.io/](http://eqonomize.github.io/)

~~~
illegalsmile
Same. YNAB4 has been great, I have no issues with it and their changelog
indicates that nothing radical with regards to budgeting has been implemented
since. Any idea if you'll be able to move YNAB data over to Eqonomize!?

~~~
benplumley
YNAB4 allows exporting as CSV, then you'll need to massage this a little bit
to get it into the format Eqonomize prefers (correct headings, etc) then
import. I started the process to see if it was possible, didn't get round to
finishing because I don't want to move until I have to, but it all seems
possible from what I can tell.

------
jedc
I can't believe no one here has mentioned Buxfer (YC W07) yet! -
[https://www.buxfer.com/](https://www.buxfer.com/)

I've tried a bunch of these apps and they're either too expensive, don't
support multiple currencies (a deal-killer for me), or don't work well.

I highly recommend them. The founders have kept it alive and even launched a
much better account syncing feature in the last few months - I happily pay for
their $5/month Pro account.

~~~
kanwisher
Honestly I couldn't get past the homepage. The UI looked horrible, and there
are no screenshots of the app so I suspect its even worse. You should invest a
bit more in your presentation

~~~
longstaff2009
they have a live demo
[https://demo.buxfer.com/dashboard](https://demo.buxfer.com/dashboard)

------
rjkennedy98
The investment view of Mint is close to useless for many reasons (Adobe being
one of the smallest). It is incapable to readjusting the cost basis when you
buy more of an asset at a different time. It also doesn't seem to understand
when you add money to account. You end up with bizarre numbers saying you made
50% in a year because you added money later, or saying you are down 50%
because you moved money out of the account. Mint is good at a few things, in
particular Net Worth tracking and getting a 360 degree view of your financial
assets. I've used it for nearly 10 years and I can see my net worth over the
entire time period with very good accuracy, which is invaluable to me.

------
SnowingXIV
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. There are manual solutions but I'm looking to have all
this automated.

Basically Mint has nailed it if it wasn't completely abandoned and didn't as
many account connectivity struggles. (it handles most of them well). They also
have turbo tax, why isn't this integrated? You have your accounts connected
already. Automatically pull the required forms from that financial provider
into turbo tax. This doesn't seem impossible.

I don't mind the "offers" ad page, but when they started integrating ads in
between transactions that was rather offensive. It's been a steep decline. I'm
really hoping someone comes up with a strong alternative (VCs get on this).
I'd be willing to pay annually too.

~~~
0xffff2
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.

~~~
stergios
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.

------
tusharsoni
After struggling with Mint and YNAB for a while, I figured that I didn't
really want to budget. I was tired of categorizing and setting up $20 budgets.
I ended up with a simpler methodology which is basically a MUCH simpler
version of YNAB. It worked really well and I've stuck with this for a while
now.

Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I launched Funded [0] that follows this
method. Would love to get feedback from the HN community too.

[0]
[https://apps.apple.com/app/id1438924754](https://apps.apple.com/app/id1438924754)

~~~
kevstev
Maybe I am just wired differently, but every budgeting program is just
annoying at best. I get "scolded" because I went over my $40 clothing budget
budget because I bought a coat or a suit, or took advantage of a sale. I don't
buy clothes one pair of socks at a time per month, I take advantage of good
sales and every few years I need a suit. One way to potentially solve this is
to "roll over" any excess from month to month.

Even worse is these auto-budgets that try to take your previous 12 months of
spending and use that as your future budget guideline. Thanks for telling me I
have a $5/month starbucks budget, since on average I take out a coworker for
coffee about that much (and again, one month I might take out 2 coworkers, and
now I get an alert that I am over budget!).

I guess in general I am quite cheap, I don't need the "discipline" of being
told how much I should spend in a month on things. If you don't have the self
control to not spend too much on discretionary things like clothing or
entertainment, I am not sure setting a budget is really going to help.

~~~
tusharsoni
Trust me, it's not just you. That is exactly why I couldn't use any of the
budgeting apps. I'm an adult and I don't want to be told by an app where I can
spend my money.

Funded takes an "anti-budgeting" approach. You only set up your obligations
and savings. You're left with discretionary spending that rolls over every
paycheck and you can spend it on whatever you want. Not tracked and not
budgeted.

Lmk what you think!

------
rafiki6
There are so many avenues to lead generation that Mint can take that would
also benefit the consumer that they just choose not to take. A simple one
could be helping me optimize which credit card products I have to maximize my
rewards. Another is offering an API to mint to allow developers to build out
plugins and tools. Mint really has an opportunity to become the defacto
personal finance platform and have market dominance similar to FB but they
just aren't capitalizing.

------
Sytten
I started using Actual Budget[0] and I love it. Not more SaaS that can break a
any moment or sell my data. End-to-end encryption and scripting built-in is
just perfect for me.

[0] [https://actualbudget.com/](https://actualbudget.com/)

~~~
skinnymuch
This is still an aaS, no, at $4/mo? If the apps still work if the company’s
servers stop working or bug out, then why pay monthly if you don’t need the
syncing?

------
vgchh
Unfortunately, personal finance has been strange as far as innovation is
concerned. Mostly it has regressed (negative innovation?). I haven't
encountered a single service that has managed to even come close to the depth
and breadth of decades old Microsoft Money. MS Money supported budgeting,
bills, cashflow forecast, investment portfolio, performance, allocations,
comparative reporting etc. All with a incredible depth. Despite all its
faults, MS built an incredible product, just that it didn't move their bottom
line. It was a sad moment when they discontinued it.

Today I like Personal Capital. But it lacks breadth. Solid Portfolio tracking,
Retirement Planner. Shallow budgeting, bill tracking, cash flow.

I miss MS Money

------
agotterer
I actually deleted my Mint account this past weekend. I received a
notification about one of my accounts not connecting and needed to upgrade the
auth. It was then I realized I hadn’t logged in for years, it provided very
little utility to me, and I was sharing a lot of purchase data and habits for
no reason. So I deleted it. This article about sums up Mints demise.

------
brighton36
I switched to
[http://plaintextaccounting.org/](http://plaintextaccounting.org/) and
couldn't be happier.

~~~
Raphmedia
It seems that this side is a faq of plaintext accounting tools. What do you
personally use?

~~~
prsy
Not OP but I use hledger and I love it. It has a learning curve (especially if
you're new to double entry accounting) but it's rewarding.

------
tictacttoe
Realized I can download my transaction info into csv format and build my own
financial analysis in python without handing over my data. It’s pretty easy to
do 90% of what you want, e.g. breakdown expenses by type.

~~~
jogjayr
I would like this, but in Excel or Google Sheets. Realized my CSV exports
don't go as far back as Mint does though :-(

------
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.

~~~
InitialLastName
You still give them plenty of data to sell.

------
ancorevard
I'm currently trying out Copilot ([https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copilot-
smart-budgets-bills/id...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copilot-smart-
budgets-bills/id1447330651))

Love the fact that it is a paid app, so my data will not be monetized as a
revenue model. Happy to pay for privacy.

~~~
uptown
"Love the fact that it is a paid app, so my data will not be monetized as a
revenue model."

They say no ads. They don't say they won't sell your data.

~~~
ancorevard
Under the heading: "Private and safe, like it should be."

"Copilot protects your information with bank-level security and has read-only
access from your financial institutions. We treat your personal data like we’d
want ours to be treated, which means never selling or sharing it with third
parties. Ever."

Source: [https://copilot.money](https://copilot.money)

~~~
uptown
Thanks for the correction. This wasn't clear from their homepage.

------
enobrev
Every year around tax time I find myself looking to replace Mint, being
unimpressed with the competition, and wondering the same thing as I import the
previous year's mint csv into a spreadsheet... Why isn't there an open source
set of tools for us to do this for ourselves?

Considering how many people seem to use Mint just to download the CSV of their
transactions for Excel or whatever, I'm surprised there isn't some sort of
open-source scraping tool (or set of scrapers) meant to be used by developers
(and normal people) that will simply grab data from your bank using your
credentials and save them into some sort of standardized format.

The standards of such a tool would revolve around standardizing the inputs
(url and auth) and outputs (structured financial info).

The obvious answer is that I should start it ("...2nd best time is now").
Unfortunately, I don't have the time. I suppose that's also the answer to the
larger question.

------
alistairSH
I haven't used Mint, so I went to take a look...

Am I missing something, or is Mint asking me to hand over the credentials to
all my other financial accounts? That strikes me a horrendously awful idea.

~~~
0xffff2
Yes they are and yes it is, but every other budgeting tool is going to ask for
the same.

~~~
alistairSH
Yeah, I can't think of another way to do this, but one breach and all my
financial accounts are leaked? That's not something I can risk.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It also boggles my mind that people are willing to give others their login
credentials, even so far as to give all of their login credentials to one
entity!

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
It's been normalized.

Even banks that explicitly prohibit user/pw sharing with external tools in
their ToS (every one of them basically), will often have aggregation features
in their portals that require you to enter the user/pw for the external
accounts you want to connect.

They might even have back-end API's that allow other aggregators programmatic
access to your data, that require your user/pw to auth. But don't share your
user/pw with anyone, they say!

------
diehunde
An (non-free) alternative is [https://copilot.money/](https://copilot.money/)

I did the trial and looks pretty solid and modern.

~~~
mikelward
No Android app. :(

~~~
untog
More crucially, no web site! App-only services like this infuriate me. For
something as crucial as the state of my money I absolutely want to use my
laptop from time to time.

Start with a (responsive) web site, then add apps as necessary. This service
does nothing that _requires_ an app.

~~~
stephensilber
The entire product is built by two people. I certainly see your point about
wanting a web-version, but if their initial expertise was in native iOS
development, then making the experience great on mobile is a fine place to
start. I haven't had any issues using it on my phone in the past 6 months or
so

------
sschueller
Off Topic, most of the services mentioned here use Plaid to connect to banks.
This means that Plaid (now Visa) has full access to your entire banking
history. Combined with credit card data they know almost everything you
purchase.

I find that fact quite unsettling.

~~~
sithlord
I think Mint uses Plaid, but I think the others may use Yodlee

~~~
pfranz
I thought Mint originally used a third party but transitioned to their own
platform years ago? I remember reading about a rocky transition for users.

------
jeremiahlee
Mint became a loss leader to sell tax preparation software.

~~~
tfandango
Now Quicken and Intuit are different companies. I am assuming Mint went with
Quicken. I use Quicken and was hoping that would result in a better product,
still on the fence. However, they are definitely focused on Quicken and not
Mint.

~~~
huebomont
Mint is still an Intuit property and nothing changed with the Quicken split.

------
yubiox
I'd love to find an app that supports my use case. I already know my
consistent monthly bills (house, electric, gas, water, sewer, internet,
cellphone, student loans, etc etc etc) and I know how much I have left over
for varying costs which are basically food/booze/entertainment. I'd like to
make a budget for just that and have it let me know how much money I have left
to eat/drink/play today, this week, this month. I already use mint and a
spreadsheet to see the big picture, I don't want to connect to anything.

------
servercobra
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.

~~~
lucasmullens
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.

~~~
LawnGnome
That's what my girlfriend and I have done for the last seven years. You have
to agree on what's a "joint" expense, but provided you work that out, it's a
very simple way of handling shared finances.

------
dontbenebby
I stopped using mint for two reasons.

1.) Privacy reasons: they don't charge for the service so I pay via data
sharing

2.) Legal concerns: my bank's TOS imply if I give my password to someone it
harms my ability to claim fraud. I worry if there is ever a security issue
with the protocols Mint uses, I will have my checking account drained or CC
used willy nilly and have to fight uphill to dispute the charges.

I used Mint for many years to track my spending.

I found that moving my "entertainment" budget - for meals out, movies, and
sundries - into cash led to me overall spending less, without the mental
strain of pouring over things.

Most credit cards nowadays give pie charts and stuff similar to Mint in the
web UI. I wish I didn't have to spread spending across multiple vendors since
I maximize cashback, but I wish someone would examine whether, in the long
run, cashback actually saves you money or if it just makes you spend more due
to the frictionless nature of using a credit card. Casinos use chips for a
reason.

I withdraw my entertainment money monthly, and it makes me think hard about
each cup of tea out etc. I think in conversations about cashless being king,
we forget the very real phenomenon of overspending with plastic.

------
speedplane
What's saddening is that Mint was so ahead of their time in this area, but it
just didn't happen.

Why can't your banker do your taxes for you? Why can't they tell you how
you'll pay for your kid's college tuition? Why can't they give you a
personalized budget to reach some level of wealth in a certain number of
years? Why can't your banker tell you when you're ready to buy a house or if
you're borrowing more than you can realistically afford? Why can't they tell
you when you're reaching dangerously high credit card debt or whether you can
really afford that auto-loan?

They could do all of this with the current data that they have. But imagine if
you gave them more data, like your current employment position, geographic
location, and family status. They might be able to tell you if you're being
under or over-paid, how others similarly situated plan their savings, or when
is the right time (if ever) to move from renting to owning real estate.

Banking systems have an enormous wealth of data, that can do so much good, but
they are still mostly a simple table of deposits and withdrawals.

------
jklinger410
I have been using Prism for the bill pay feature.

[https://www.prismmoney.com/](https://www.prismmoney.com/)

------
tempsy
I’ve never found these account aggregators to be that useful for me.

Most people have one bank account and maybe 1-3 credit cards. Often at the
same bank. To me the digital experience for the big US banks like Chase and
Amex are good enough that I don’t find something like Mint would add anything
for me, and worse I can’t actually do anything with my account in an
aggregator so what’s the point?

~~~
InitialLastName
Quick: in the last year, what % of your discretionary income did you spend on
dining out? Across multiple payment methods?

That's the kind of question that my bank's statements don't let me readily
answer, but something like Mint does (I use YNAB because its flow works better
for me, but YMMV).

------
mikece
I had forgotten about Mint the financial company... I thought the headline was
talking about Mint Mobile (who I use for my cellular service).

~~~
kcmastrpc
I immediately thought about the Linux distro. Sad.

------
archildress
Does anyone have suggestions on an alternative to Mint that simply aggregates
data into a CSV / XLSX export across all of my accounts? I understand that
Plaid's technology is designed to do this; I just wasn't sure if anyone had
implemented it. For the record, I'd pay probably $10 - $20 per month for a
service that does this with no privacy implications.

~~~
mendelk
Tiller ([https://www.tillerhq.com/](https://www.tillerhq.com/)) does exactly
this. You can dump the data into Google Sheets or into Excel.

------
Rafuino
I've been using Mint consistently since mid-2016, and it's worked just fine
for me. The Flash requirement for investment charts is annoying, but you can
get around that with the trends charts by account. Frankly, what's useful to
me is seeing the trends in my spending, earning, and savings rate over the
past 3.5 years, and if I were to switch to another option that's being
recommended here, I imagine I would lose all of that trend data.

Mint can be stupid at times (like counting transfers as spending), but you can
fix those errors pretty easily. The ads are surprisingly irrelevant to me
(e.g. offering a credit card that's worse than the one I primarily use), but I
don't really care about that. If anything, I just need more investment
guidance, not more credit cards...

------
LaserToy
It broke. I have 2 BoA accounts and some time ago it made 1 of them inactive
and I just couldn’t make them both work. The one I re add becomes the one Mint
sees and another one becomes inactive.

It also miscalculated cash flow. Graph shows negative when in reality it is
positive.

I guess it is a price to pay for acquisition.

~~~
chrisamiller
FWIW, I have this same BoA issue and have been trying for months to escalate
it to someone who can actually do something about it. It's frustrating, to say
the least.

------
mail2harvinder
I believe its mostly to do with the business model of Mint. In their initial
years they were radically focused on the product and customer experience. But
as with every so-called FREE product owners, founders of mint have now shifted
their complete focus to monetization.

This is pattern and I have witnessed it happening in india too with personal
finance products. Infact founders are expressly building products on mint
model: create free expense tracking app, spend a year on customer experience,
acquire millions of users, and finally shift their focus on upselling
financial products leaving customers in the lurch. This looks like a brutal
barter system to me.

One day users will figure out a solution to this pervasive problem in software
industry and will choose products/tools prudently.

------
epage
I feel like Mint has reverted in functionality. It used to be that I rarely
corrected and auto-categorization and now I feel like I do it with 1out out of
10 line items.

The Flash issue is also terrible.

For more challenging but important features

\- With companies like Amazon, a purchase can span multiple categories. While
fraught with privacy issues, an innovation in this space would be to work with
payment providers to capture more information, like receipt line items. If an
amazon purchase could be split into my groceries vs media, that'd be amazing.

\- I feel like Mint's budgeting misses the mark and is useless to me. While
literal categorizations can be useful for digging into the data, it isn't how
I budget. For example, "fun" money could come from several literal categories.

------
sixjarsappp
I didn't want to share my financial data and wanted to use the six jars
budgeting system so I made this tool to help myself. It's a pwa so you can
save it to your phone and all of the data is stored locally (very private).
Nothing ever gets posted to the server.

sixjars.xyz

------
fulldecent2
The addressable market for Mint is people that want to track their budget.
They maxed out. Their only revenue model is giving you leads for credit cards
based on broad categories.

\---

With a little more data it would be amazing. Just forward your Gmail to it and
it would line up all your receipts with all your credit card purchases. Now
its revenue model is Honey and giving you targeted adds for competitors to
specific SKUs it knows you are buying.

\---

Who would be dumb enough to give all their emails to this type of company? I
don't know, but there are piles of people that give out their bank passwords
to "validate their accounts" with Plaid. So maybe it is not too low.

------
Summershard
The best non-US service I've found is Everypocket[1]. It almost seems like a
glorified Excel, but it's just so simple. Unfortunately, it looks like the dev
has abandoned the project. He doesn't respond on his own subreddit[2] anymore.

I prefer the so-called zero-based budgeting. I dislike YNAB though.

[1]: [https://www.everypocket.com/](https://www.everypocket.com/)

[2]:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/everypocket/](https://old.reddit.com/r/everypocket/)

------
bryanmgreen
Mint is great for tracking my spending and plain numbers, but lacks a lot of
features.

I use a Google Sheet to track my worth bi-annually. It's real easy to update
and only doing it twice a year forces me to not micro-manage my money which
reduces bad-decisions and stress.

Here's the template with some dummy data:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AKA3qM8T5PNbmXoW5XKY...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AKA3qM8T5PNbmXoW5XKYA1pO9H4LhXRtNhR6NB0Wk6Y/edit?usp=sharing)

------
peterwwillis
> It’s as if Mint, with 13 million-plus registered users, were a resource-
> constrained startup instead of a property of Intuit

Somebody doesn't get how business units work. Your OPEX has to constantly
decrease while the revenue has to constantly increase, but your revenue mostly
goes to other BUs' CAPEX. So there's no money to fix tech debt, unless it's
buying crap to scale with, _if_ you can show growth. Doesn't matter if your
daddy is M$, your allowance will still suck unless your lemonade stand is
making bank.

------
guelo
He forgot to mention all the innovation they've added to Mint in the way of
new types of intrusive ads. Intuit bought Mint anti-competetively to protect
Quicken. But they've also neglected Quicken and shifted it to a scummy
subscription service. Probably they can't see a way making enough money off of
personal finance. Intuit is a scummy company and I stay away from them. The
real problem is banks not giving us open APIs to build our own personal
finance tools.

------
jbrantly
I see lots of alternative suggestions here, but not much mention of
PocketSmith. I just ditched Mint a couple weeks ago after using them for 10
years and settled on trying PocketSmith. So far I've been pretty impressed.
Their support has been on point, and they have some really neat forecasting
features. There are some pain points though like their mobile app lacking some
critical features and their use of Yodlee. Not associated, just wanted to
share.

------
JaiminDesai93
Hey all, I noticed a bunch of folks talking about categorizing charges and the
difficulties surrounding that. I've been working on an app that makes this a
one-step process just by using Siri. Check it out here:
[https://launch.getreconcile.com/](https://launch.getreconcile.com/)

Sorry for the shameless plug! Thought it would be appropriate to share my
solution as it might help some of you out.

~~~
city41
IMO, the image showing all the various Siri interactions should be at the very
top. It succinctly describes the product quite nicely.

~~~
JaiminDesai93
Thanks for that feedback, I'll move some things around!

------
jfkw
I've never understood what motivated financial institutions to grant Mint
access to account transactions and balances? Did pre-acquisition Mint somehow
reach a tipping point in active users where financial institutions decided
their customers would choose other banks if theirs wasn't accessible through
Mint?

Are there other competing tools that have similar reach connecting to
financial institution accounts?

~~~
alasdair_
The financial institutions never gave mint access. What happened is that mint
takes a users username and password then logs in as that user and downloads
(or scrapes) the transactions.

Nowadays it’s a bit more integrated with the banks, with oauth support etc.
but initially they were basically just scraping.

And yes, this is a massive security hole and likely against the banks TOS
(deliberately giving your credentials to a third party).

~~~
pfranz
A bunch of people in this thread complain how integration has gotten way worse
over the years. I'm pretty confident this is banks "fighting back" with 2-fa
and other additional security measures--many seem to have the goal of locking
out these kinds of services. A very few seem to be embracing it (they have a
token system that have revokable read-only access).

Personally, I'm looking to move banks/credit cards towards services with
better integration at the expense of other things like better returns.

------
nerdjon
I have been using Mint for a while but recently have been looking into
alternatives (including paid ones).

But the biggest issue I am seeing is while a lot of services claim to try to
be smarter, they often miss a lot of the smaller features (like actually
categorizing my Amazon purchases properly...) that Mint has.

I am evaluating Albert (and going to look at some of the others here), but
curious if anyone has any recommendations?

------
jmull
Isn't it a free service? Yet it costs money to run, more money to minimally
maintain, and a lot of money to keep fully current and improve.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be a thriving product, but for that to happen
Intuit would have to be wringing a lot of money out of it somehow through a
side channel or back channel.

A semi-neglected aging service probably isn't the worst scenario for its
users.

------
Brendinooo
I like Mint primarily for its aggregation of all of my accounts. There are
some occasional hiccups but in general it works very well with that. Then I
download transactions as a CSV file and reconcile them manually in a
spreadsheet.

Are any products mentioned here more tailored to that use case? More about the
transaction log and quick glance at assets/debts than the budgeting and
charts?

------
pbhjpbhj
Title needs "... Mint [personal finance service (USA)]"

I assumed it was Mint the Linux distro, it's one of the most over used company
names.

------
tegansnyder
Does anybody know of automated waterfall budgeting solution? I want to be able
to forecast the future if I stick to my pay off plans. I want to be able to
enter my bills, what I owe on them, then run scenarios on my financial future
if I payed certain things off before others in waterfall fashion. Having an
idea of the future helps motivate.

------
jdlyga
I've had it linked to my accounts since 2011, and it's great to have such a
rich history to search through. Sure it's not the greatest, but it's miles
ahead of the bank's interfaces for searching through transactions. It's easy
to export things to csv and make budgets by adding up category totals.

------
cryptozeus
To me nothing much has happened to mint. It is fine and it always could be
much much better but this article does not make much sense. Who cares if its
flash, it does the job like before. It still has issue categorizing some of
the transactions but it works.

Mind for personally has been a game changer. It helped me take control of all
my finances.

------
citilife
I use Mint regularly, perhaps there have not been many improvements, but it
works very well and I have had no issues.

------
seshagiric
My favorite Mint bug: If you are lucky accounts get listed twice so you can
double your money by using Mint.

Bug or a feature :)

------
o_____________o
Prism is pretty amazing and seems woefully underutilized:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobilligy....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobilligy.android&hl=en_US)

------
tsuru
Are they still using YUI?

I left because it felt like updates never happened; they just lost or reset my
cost basis for my three years worth of investment tracking at the time; and it
was now owned by a company hostile to tax-payer convenience.

It felt great to leave.

------
jxramos
> Intuit buying out its own competitor, in turn, echoed Microsoft’s failed
> attempt two decades earlier to purchase Intuit, which had trounced its
> Microsoft Money software.)

Anybody know the history about why Microsoft Money failed to hold ground?

------
candiddevmike
If you're looking for a envelope budgeting solution (along with meal planning,
shopping lists, and more), consider using Domestica:

[https://about.domestica.app](https://about.domestica.app)

------
RankingMember
It's pretty clear what happened to me. Mint suddenly needed to be profitable
once it was acquired, so the user experience was severely degraded by
ads/"offers" being plopped in as often as possible.

------
alexfromapex
It still exists, I just refreshed my account a few months ago and now it sends
me 6 notifications every month whenever my student loan payments are due
because I entered all 6 sub-loans which are part of my main loan.

------
liamuk
I've been using [https://copilot.money/](https://copilot.money/) which is
great.

Clean UI, uses Plaid to import transactions, paid for by subscription, not
your data.

~~~
caseyf7
If it uses Plaid, they are taking all of the data they can get from your banks
with your login.

~~~
liamuk
Fair-- I've resigned to viewing Plaid as our necessary evil banking
infrastructure provider.

It's my understanding that, at the least, Plaid doesn't sell data to third
parties you don't authorize. If I'm wrong about this I'd love to know.

------
debt
Honestly, the biggest value Mint and all the Intuit products have is the
import from X-bank/investment account/etc. I'd pay for the ability to import
into a spreadsheet from my money accounts.

------
kaizendad
I switched to [https://www.honeyfi.com/](https://www.honeyfi.com/) and
couldn't be happier. It's really powerful for handling joint finances.

------
wnissen
Anyone who has seen how Intuit has bungled Quicken for the Mac multiple times
in multiple ways for over a decade would not be surprised. I'm willing to pay
for upgrades and still incredibly frustrated.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Quicken is a different company now than Intuit, as of spring 2016.

FWIW, I worked at Intuit after that divestiture, and there are super smart
honest people there, comparable to high ranking pals from years of Apple
engineering days, but, cripplingly, some total engineering absurdities from
old-timers.

Basically, technical debt was vast.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken)

~~~
wnissen
Oh, that explains why they seemingly have a real version out there. I've been
suspicious to try it, but if they are separate it might be worth a try.

------
asdff
I moved around through a lot of budget apps/ynab/etc. Ended up just binding
the .csv from different accounts together and taking another look by hand.
It's good to review spending, anyway.

------
Raphmedia
Mint used to be ahead of most banks. Nowadays, a lot of banks have budgeting
tools built-in. My use of Mint slowly faded away as my bank's software became
better. Now, I don't use Mint anymore.

------
greyhair
I have a mint account. Have not used it in three years. It kept failing to
sync to my accounts and I got sick of correcting it all the time. It ended up
being a huge burden compared to the value added.

------
whatsmyusername
I mean, they were feature complete. There was nothing to add, only to remove
to add an upsell.

It also doesn't help they run on Plaid and Plaid's a ticking time bomb piece
of tech (despite what they sold for).

------
laserson
I like TillerHQ ([https://tillerhq.com/](https://tillerhq.com/)) for just
extracting the financial data and dumping into a spreadsheet.

------
throwaway122378
I was a big user of Mint for years, loved it. Then one day I realized they are
aggregating all of my valuable data for nothing in return in terms value added
product. So I left.

~~~
throw_14JAS
I'm confused as to why you loved it, if it added no value. Do you mean that
you emotionally loved using it _, but on an actual examination, realized it
didn 't help you manage your money?

_ my experience: I felt like I was a Responsible Adult when I used it, but
didn't actually budget any better.

~~~
throwaway122378
On the surface it’s a great tool to consolidate all of my financial accounts
in real time- checking, savings, credit cards, and investments. With a little
effort the categorization of each transaction was helpful in tracking my
spending. That’s where the usefulness ended. Most categories became cluttered
with noise after a while and when I left there were no bill pay tools (not
sure if they have those now?). Budgeting tools weren’t smart and at some point
I started seeing ads for new credit cards each time I logged in. They has
access to every single transaction I made, priceless data, and blew it.

------
dddddaviddddd
I now use firefly-iii. I always found Mint's storing banking credentials
uncomfortable. I find that inputting transactions manually increases my
awareness of spending.

------
beardedman
Bought out. Lack of innovation. After a while it feels a lot like lack of
trying (in a relationship sense). I'm looking at you Evernote.

------
brailsafe
Wave is actually pretty decent now. Used to have an abysmal interface, but
made some moves in the last few years.

I wish mint kept going. Used to love it.

------
NikolaNovak
Extremely coincidentally, I literally had Mint.com open for my daily scan when
I saw this article.

From the quote: "For all of Mint’s failure to evolve and improve, its core
functionality continues to be fundamentally useful."

\--> Brilliant. That makes it EXACTLY how I like my tools & apps. It has
basic, streamlined, mature, well-evolved and easy functionality, it works well
and predictably, the owner is not trying to squeeze it out of extra revenue,
and all's well with the world.

------
haroon
Truebill is what Mint was supposed to be if it wasn't acquired. Plus, we're
YC. If you haven't yet, try it!

------
dfischer
I really like `albert` on the Apple Store for this. They even have texting as
a component to it which is really nice.

------
savrajsingh
Personal Capital is great -- it's free, way better than mint, and you don't
have to do the investment stuff if you don't want to. I really like it. Get
$50 at my referral link, too. :)
[https://share.personalcapital.com/x/xtw34J](https://share.personalcapital.com/x/xtw34J)

------
thrower123
Reminds me that I really need to log back into this and wipe any data that can
be wiped...

------
cliqueiq
Yeah, this is what's gonna happen to Plaid.

------
fnord77
my brokerage/bank now does what mint does - aggregate data from different
accounts from different banks and brokerages.

------
fatninja
Wow! I see that they removed flash now!

------
cryptica
It was just a shell company, nothing but a social monetization machine. Like
most startups of that time.

------
pc86
What the Hell Happened to FastCompany?

Full-screen autoplay (with sound) video add for a credit card.

~~~
rchaud
Works fine on Brave browser with Javascript off. My new go to config for
pretty much all news sites where I only want to see images and text.

------
albeec13
More like, "Why is Intuit so awful?"

My personal story on this:

I was a Mint early-adopter, and some time before Intuit purchased Mint I was
also a TurboTax online user. I liked using Mint mostly just to track my net
worth / assets and did so for several years.

Fast forward a year or two, and Intuit had purchased Mint. A few months later
I came to realize that Intuit was now creating TurboTax accounts for all
existing Mint users without bothering to cross-reference existing account
email addresses between the two databases. When I signed up for Mint
originally, it was using your full email address as a user name. So now, I had
a Mint account which was my email address, an old TurboTax account which had
that same email address on file, but a different user name, and a new TurboTax
account which WAS my email address, tied to the existing Mint account.

So what happened? I tried to log into Turbo Tax using the account I already
had used for taxes in the past to import my Mint information, but I was told
that email address is already in use by another TurboTax account - the one
Intuit created for me instead of merging my existing accounts...

Several phone calls later, I was assured the only path forward was to start
using the new account to do my taxes if I want Mint integration. I decline and
asked why they couldn't just get rid of the erroneous new account they created
for me and let me combine the ones I already had. I was not about to lose
years of tax returns on my old account to start a new account without that
information. They said it was impossible.

Ultimately, I decided I'd delete the old Intuit/TurboTax account and start
fresh, to take advantage of the integration features. They told me they were
required by law to keep my old TurboTax account data, but that I could change
the password to something random/long and change the email address to
something non-existent to prevent myself or anyone else from being able to log
in anymore.

At this point, I was very annoyed, and chose a suitably-annoyed fake email
address directing hatred toward Intuit, which I won't repeat here, but rest
assured it included a reference to Intuit and non-standard sex acts. I also
changed the password to a 64-character random string, which I did not write
down. Fast forward a couple weeks...

Lo and behold, I tried logging into Mint a few weeks after changing my Intuit
password and wouldn't you know, that account was inaccessible now, the exact
opposite of what I was told they were going to do... Better yet, I couldn't
reset the password because I had changed the account email address on file to
the aforementioned vulgarity. Now you see where this is going... I called
customer service, and the rep assured me she could help if I could recall the
email address I had used... So, I apologized in advance, and proceeded to tell
her the address was "Eff"IntuitInThe"A"@"eff"you.com (something in this
ballpark, and edited for language).

Needless to say, we had a good laugh. I haven't really used Mint ever since,
and have been considering deleting my account (if I can even do that without
destroying my TurboTax account...)

