Follow-up: Why I deleted my Mint.com account
A long time ago (in Internet years) I discovered a service that made my financial life much more structured – and thus, better. Based on no real reviews or recommendations I signed up for an account on Mint.com and started entering in all my banking account details. I watched in amazement as it hoovered in my checking, my savings, my retirement, my (copious) debt account details and transactions and handed me the not-quite-so-rosy picture of my financial health.
Long story short: I got a new, better-paying job and I had tactile feedback as to where our money was going. The result was a massive reduction in debt over the course of the following year.
Since then I’ve deleted my Mint.com account entirely.
Simply put, Mint fell on its face in a huge way. Living off of one income while we raise our amazing son, the idea of budgeting and knowing where our finances are is critical these days. Possibly due to its explosive user base growth or some banks’ competing technology, I found myself spending increasingly-frustrating amounts of time reconciling my supposedly-automated Mint account updates or waiting for temporary connection issues to fix themselves. The final straw came when I started documenting transactions that I had categorized reverting to other categories over the course of a few days. Reporting these to Mint support, with screen shots, resulted in… nothing. No feedback or even replies.
And yes, it’s entirely acceptable to complain about a free service – one that I had entrusted my financial information to and which used my financial profile to market services to me.
I’ve since turned to You Need a Budget (YNAB) – software that I’ve paid full price for desktop and iPhone clients. While some might see YNAB as having a steep learning curve or being too labor-intensive (every transaction is entered manually) it’s making a tremendous amount of sense to me. Mint was great – when it worked – in helping me to watch the overall trends of our debt going down, but where it failed me completely was in its budgeting tools. As soon as Mint started changing the categorization of my transactions my budgets became meaningless. We simply don’t have enough money to not assign each dollar a job (yeah, I can speak the YNAB speak) while still trying to pay down debt. YNAB has been great – the iPhone client is awesome in that it allows me to just enter transactions anywhere, then sync up and balance our checkbook when at home. There’s less fear on my part knowing that no one will be updating those accounts other than me – Mint’s automatic updates destroyed my trust in their service.
For now I feel like I’ve started over – I only have three months of budgeting under my belt, and it feels like I’m trying to budget during the most financially unpredictable time of the year. But I strongly believe YNAB is one of maybe two or three personal finance tools out there that’s worth the time and effort you put into it, and will help us mature financially in the years to come.
Categorised as: Meatspace
Remember, if the service is free then YOU are the product.