Mint was useful to me for a while until it started forcibly recategorizing stuff with no way to fix it. Tech support was aggressively worthless to the point that I fully shut down every Intuit account I had (they have their tentacles in some surprising businesses). Fuck Intuit and their data hoarding and their anti-taxpayer lobbying and their cold-blooded murder of what was once the only half-decent money tracking app.
This is a good example of what was once a really good company that made really good products but was ruined by the business bros. Everything they touch turns into garbage.
I use YNAB (you need a budget) it’s not free but it’s GREAT for setting savings goals, paying back debt, etc.
It’s also flexible if you need to break your budget for some reason. You can pull from another bucket easily (gas bill is high, pull from emergency savings or cut from gaming), or just overspend and it goes on a report to keep track and plan better.
The best part is peace of mind on big bills - when it comes time to pay taxes or pay for my 6mo car insurance I’ve already been saving 1/12 or 1/6 of that total every month leading up to it. I can put everything in auto pay and never have to worry about the money being there.
Man I used YNAB a ton as a freelancer starting out as a sort of bubblegum and paper clip solution for tracking my expenditures/purchases. It’s a surprisingly, flexible program and was definitely worth the money. Really glad I had it. Not saying that’s how people should use it, but the point is it’s just really good for tracking money in/money out.
I’ll third YNAB. I’ve been using it for years. Being able to see how the money in your checking account already has a purpose and isn’t sitting there waiting to be spent on some bullshit is huge. My SO and I argue about stuff, but our financial stress, a huge problem in many relationships, is nonexistent.
Yeah I used be like wow I have $5000 time to buy some bullshit. But really $3-4000 of that is upcoming expenses so I really only have $1000 and I should use that to pay down a CC or student loans.
I tried it for some time but couldn’t get past the onerous need to reconcile and categorize every single transaction that it detects. It finally made me shut down my account because it caused me such great anxiety.
It auto categorizes now but it’s still a little tedious, sometime recently they added batch categorizing so I can grab all the restaurants and add that to my Eating Out category but it also forces me to look at my finances every couple days which is a good habit imo.
Ugh. I shared this with my wife and she is really saddened by the news. We have over a decade of historical data on Mint and she really values the insights it has been able to give to her in planning for a family.
Hopefully, the community can suggest some viable alternatives :|
Be sure to export your data. I wouldn’t be surprised if alternatives made a feature to upload old data, and at the very least you could pop it into a spreadsheet so it’s not completely lost.
The thing I love most about Monarch is that they actively work to improve it. It’s not perfect but they really listen to feedback and every one of my bug reports has been addressed quickly.
How is it with connecting (and staying connected) to different services? My biggest complaint with Mint was how randomly some connections would fail due to not having a standard.
Some of them fail occasionally. The problem account I have (out of 20+) is my Mohela student loans, but I just reconnect it every few months since the balance doesn’t change much.
Wow, this is news to me. I found it so useful to be able to see all of my financial information in one place. I don’t want to have to open up 4 or 5 sites all the time just to make sure my bills are getting paid and I don’t have any fraudulent transactions.
I’m conflicted on this, it’s good to have options but its rough knowing that fees of delivery will be taking food away from people. That’s the tradeoff, I guess.
Yeah, considering the compounding problems of transportation and food deserts in the US I think this could be helpful for a lot of people, but on the other hand I’m not wild about a company like Uber extracting profit from public assistance. Feels a little exploitative.
Wait, which services waive fees?? It would be great if those exist in my area. My location has ebt support via instacart, but the fees are definitely a huge out of pocket expense. EBT does not cover them.
(1) Unlike Trump, I really don’t think Biden wanted to run a cult - for the same reason that humans with empathy would never want such a thing. (2) I seem to recall that Trump found many in his cult to be quite creepy - referring to them as ‘disgusting’ for instance.
The loan forgiveness was killed in the courts. The president doesn't have the power required to forgive student loans. As far as I know, the only way left to do loan forgiveness is through a bill passed through congress.
Bidens plan was designed to fail so they could blame the courts for his incompetence. Roberts mentioned in his piece that the wrong method of canceling debt was used, the exact opposite of what Biden was advised to use.
Democrats are ineffective at governing and need to stop being rewarded with reelection
Sure it’s possible it was “designed to fail” but not because the wrong method was used but because our current extremist supreme court would have used any excuse to stop it. It was based on the same HEROES Act that Trump’s pause of student loans was based on and the act explicitly says “waive or modify” loans so if Biden’s cancelation was illegal then so was Trump’s pause.
Here is a quote from the DOJ: “The plain text of the HEROES Act authorizes the Secretary to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to” the federal student loan program, … We conclude that targeting relief towards those individuals who suffered financial hardship because of COVID -19 and who otherwise satisfy the requirements of the Act accords with the Act’s requirement that the waiver or modification “be necessary to ensure that” student loan recipients who are “affected” by a national emergency “are not placed in a worse position financially” with respect to their loans as a result.”
He purposely chose the wrong method is all anyone needs to hear. It doesn't matter what happens after that. Choosing the wrong method purposely makes him 100% to blame.
Oh my god [edited to be civil and respectful] even if democrats got literally nothing done they’d still be infinitely better than the entirely corrupt party of intentionally backsliding morons. At this point the republicans and their supporters are a big enough threat to our democracy that enough trademarked democratic infighting could actually bring this whole system down, and not in the way you’d want.
Where’s your knowledge of current events led you man? That was struck down by the Republican dominated Supreme Court. Biden fought hard to get it that far, and his attempts fall in line with the original HEROS Act of 2003. It was the conservatives who robbed you of student loan forgiveness, not Biden
This is great, but what I’m really struck by is the Fox News homepage’s top story is about the autopsy of Obama’s chef? I didn’t realize how out of touch I am with right wing media. I assume there is some conspiracy that Obama had his chef killed for “reasons”? Or maybe this is some vaccine conspiracy? Can you imagine what your brain would be like if this was your main source of news?
I just checked as I’m writing this out of curiosity. Top story on CNN is Prigozhin being killed. Top story on Fox News is “Hunter Biden went on foreign trips.” No wonder so many people’s brains are rotten.
With special thanks to the empathy-challenged wing of the political spectrum:
For those unfamiliar with the lore, the “Dark Brandon” meme originated out of a conservative insult lobbed at the president during a NASCAR race in 2021. Racegoers yelling “Fuck Joe Biden” were misheard by a reporter as saying “Let’s go, Brandon,” and thus, a new slogan for Donald Trump supporters was born.
But over the course of the last two years, the GOP’s beloved anti-Biden rallying cry has morphed into a boon for the president’s reelection campaign. Biden staffers and voters online embraced the joke to communicate that, yes, the 80-year-old was the bogeyman conservatives believed him to be, if only because he was successfully pushing through an agenda they hated.
theverge.com
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