It took me completely by surprise to read about Mint closing down and them moving their customers to Credit Karma, another similar financial planning service in the Intuit portfolio.

I don’t blame Intuit for consolidating their brands, but I would have thought bringing Credit Karma features and users to Mint may have been a better option, but perhaps it is about organizations, talent, technology stack, and much more than what we see as outsiders and in my case, as a customer.

I have had data in Mint since 2013 and have been using it as a place where I see transactions from all my financial institutions and a place where I see general trends of my income and expense. I do not use it for budgeting or to monitor my investments in any way. For my use though, what is important is that all my institutions are supported, and I can search for transactions easily.

Once the news broke, I had to quickly start looking for alternatives and I was debating really looking at Credit Karma when through Threads, I found out about Monarch Money. The service seemed quite nicely designed and had a web presence as well as mobile, so I decided to jump into their trial. As I dove into the service, I found out that it was founded by one of Mint’s original product persons, so I got some confidence that the service will be shepherded well.

Monarch Money

It was very easy to set up Monarch Money (MM) by adding accounts. Unlike Mint, MM uses third party data connectors like Plaid, MX and Fincity so it was an interesting experience going through the setups – some institutions bounced the authentication to their own mini windows, and some used Plaid’s user interface. Regardless, in no time I had most of my recent data in MM and could start seeing some trends and cash flow analysis.

I also noticed they had a Help & Support interface within the app and on the web which created a support ticket on the back end. The response there was meh, but in my attempt to find some answers to questions not on the FAQ, I stumbled upon their subreddit r/MonarchMoney. This was a great subreddit where they acknowledged and welcomed Mint refugees and had a few employees responding to many threads which was a refreshing surprise.

I had exported transactions from Mint and MM had a Mint import feature which I used heavily to bring in the historical data from Mint so that I could start using MM as a true Mint replacement – seeing my income and expenses, over time, and also being able to search for random transactions from the past.

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This is where I started seeing a bunch of nuances in these financial aggregation services

• Balances for each account are independent of the underlying transactions: MM brings in balances separately from transactions which is good and bad – good because I don’t need a proper accounting ledger of gives and takes to make the balance work out (flashback of nightmares trying to balance by desktop Quicken from years past!), and bad because I would never know if there was a glitch in the transactions like duplicates or missing data because the overall numbers would look fine
• Brokerages are a beast: Some brokerages do not have transactions at all, some do but I can’t import older data, and some can be hacked to get in the older data but may not reflect in any reporting and such. Frankly, because I never used the investment analysis portion of Mint and don’t care about it elsewhere, I am fine with it as long as the balances look good and I am able to cross-reference deposits made from my checking account to the brokerages (somehow!)
• Some key accounts either did not connect or had issues: My HSA provider Optum Bank did not connect at all so I had to create a manual account and import older data from Mint just to get a placeholder. Similarly, one of the several accounts I have with Ameriprise was missing. And Fidelity kept losing connection every other day. (Optum has since been able to be added but I can’t do transactions import, Ameriprise continues to be an issue and Fidelity is resolved by switching providers)

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What I like about MM compared to Mint at first glance:

• The user interface and design: It is so much more lively compared to Mint. Also, because it is a subscription service, no ads! Wow, such a big difference!
• Rules: In Mint, I was not able to created rules based on payee names containing certain characters, it would only set up for the exact name. So if the payee has some type of ID in their name which keeps changing, the rules would never execute. In MM I can do a “contains” type of a rule and it works like a charm!
• Additional user: MM encourages co-management of finances and I added my wife immediately so she can participate in the financial management with me. And it works – she sees data and understands it much better than my passive updates from earlier.
• Concept of review: All transactions in MM start as not reviewed and I could set it up so whenever there are new transactions to review, that it sends me a notification. This is excellent because I can look at the transactions every other day, review for correctness and update categories or rules if needed and clear them out. I am much more on top of individual transactions now than before.
• Batch mode of fetching data: MM fetches data in the background and does it periodically. I like this because when I open the app or website, there is no waiting for refresh, I see the data immediately.
• Public roadmap: This was another pleasant surprise – not only is there a section to request new features, but the actual features under planning and development are exposed on their website so we can see what’s coming! So good.

What I am waiting for:

• Fix missing and problematic accounts: I really need that one Ameriprise account added, and get some stability in certain problematic accounts which keep disconnecting frequently
• Some weird duplication: There is an account which seems to be showing data from another account at the same institution and not its own transactions. The balance seems fine and I don’t have much activity in that account, so it’s not such a big deal but my OCD would sure like the transactions to be fixed
• Support overwhelmed: Because of the huge influx of Mint refugees, their support has crumbled to a halt – the main customer support as well as reddit. In the past couple days I have seen some immediate responses when I create a ticket, but it is still something they need to ramp up on and I am sure they will normalize soon
• Native Apple Card and Apple Savings Account support: Right now the card data is importable seamlessly by creating an Apple Card account (only from mobile) but there is not even a workaround support for Apple Savings account.

I am a fan so far and even though it is a bit expensive @ $95/year, I would subscribe to it. They have offered a 50% discount for the first year and extended my already-extended trial by another 30 days, so I know they are customer-centric at the core.

Quicken Simplifi

I had forgotten about Quicken since I moved to Mint in 2013 and I was surprised to see their online service Simplifi as a competitor to Mint and Monarch Money. The look and feel drew me in, so I decided to do my own bake-off between MM and Quicken Simplifi (QS).

Setup was similar to MM, but for some reason, the accounts got added more quickly than MM. I am sure it is a perception issue because by the time I started using QS, I had gone through a lot of bumps on the MM journey.

Maybe it’s the typeface they use and/or the fact that they have pretty tiles and reports on the main dashboard, but at first glance, QS seemed more attractive than MM. I did the same steps as I did with MM – set up the accounts, and then import the Mint exported data one account at a time. QS, like MM, had a Mint importer that interpreted the Mint csv nicely.

Support at QS has also been impacted by the influx of Mint refugees and they also have a good subreddit at r/Simplifimoney and even though I have seen some employees respond, it doesn’t seem like their primary form of support for end customers and instead it is more of a user community. Their actual website user community is very active and because it seems like an older product, there are a lot more articles and knowledge bases to tap into. Their support has a great generative AI-based bot which switches to human messaging-based support medium and that support is very prompt.

What I like about QS compared to Mint is very much like what I like about MM compared to Mint. QS does not do batch fetching so there is an occassional spinning I have seen when it refreshes all the accounts but that’s ok. Also, the additional user can only be added from the web and I guess that’s a temporary issue. Also, the support mentioned above is a big plus over MM.

One thing that I kinda like with QS is that movement of money from one account to another – credit card payments, loan payments, etc. is like the desktop Quicken experience: it changes the category of both sides of the transaction to the be other account name. So for example if I paid $100 to my Amex from my BofA checking account I would see the check account $100 categorized as “Amex” and the debit in my Amex show as $100 with category of “BofA checking”. That’s nice because there is no additional information I need on each of those transactions than the fact that it went from one of my accounts to the other. Both those transactions are skipped from spending reports, naturally.

To my surprise, transactions from accounts like PayPal which are transacted ultimately through a credit card also show up nicely where the PayPal transaction is duplicated so one of them can be categorized properly as shopping or whatever and the other represents the transfer of funds from credit card to PayPal to fund the original purchase.

What I am waiting for:

• Performance: After I imported the 10 years of data in about 15 accounts, the performance on the web and on mobile has been terrible. It is almost useless right now because every update I make requires about 2-3 seconds of waiting before I can take the next action in the interface. If they don’t fix this soon as a step function improvement, QS will be a non-starter for me
• Venmo: After I added Venmo, I have not been able to make the sync work. It keeps asking for login credentials and I enter and authenticate and it fails to connect – hope that gets addressed soon
• Better “review” notifications: I love how MM sends me notifications for new transactions to review. QS is not as good with the concept of review as a precursor to “finalizing” a transaction and I have a workaround where I enabled the notification for any transaction > $0.01 but would rather see a more seamless interface and workflow
• Apple Card and Apple Savings Account: Same as MM comments above

I am also a fan of QS and it is less expensive than MM, so if they make the performance improvements, it will be a very tough call for me to choose between the two services.

I have made the decision to let the bake-off run for a year and decide which one to stop after seeing the progres or lack of during the year.

fwiw, I also tried Copilot Money for a brief second, but didn’t even go beyond the trial because they did not have a Mint importer and they did not have a web presence. Also, their apps were only iOS and MacOS so it would have been a stretch. The interface and design was nice though.

Sound off in the comments if you are in a similar boat as me and what your experiences have been.