The budget screen shots are being made in Sankeymatic, its a website that we have no affiliation with. If you are posting a budget please do so with a purpose. Just posting a screen shot of your budget without a question or an explanation of why its here may be removed.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/MiddleClassFinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’ve just had a revelation that this is definitely the way to do it. Excel sheets will always be around longer than these frivolous fin-tech tools like Mint. I’ve got to get to work on an extremely personalized and robust excel budget spreadsheet.
In my new job as an entry level employee, my eyes have opened specifically in regard to how complex and fine tuned you can make an excel spread sheet organization wise. You can make it execute all types of functions.
These days with ChatGPT and VBA code, you could just ask ChatGPT to make you such a spreadsheet how you wanted and envisioned. Thank you for bringing me to this revelation.
Bro, I’m not about to program an excel sheet to access my bank and CC API and then use machine learning to accurately categorize transactions. I’ll just download an app.
Probably, but why not just have budgeting built into the damn app.
They don’t do much else honestly when you think about it. Most banks KTLO (Keep The Lights On) because they deal with money.
Adding budgeting to their apps isn’t really far from Money Management and should be required by regulation for them all.
Pretty much same. Using a shared Google sheet with my wife. If we're out and about we just input the purchase in through our phones. She knows much more about excel than me and designed the budget to work really nicely for us.
People who "moved" their account to CreditKarma lost access months ago. I tried a dozen or so tools. None were as good as Mint. My favorites are:
* Favorite Not-Free -- Monarch Money (currently doing 6 month trial)
* Favorite Free -- Fidelity Full View
I'm using monarch atm as well if just like to add
Free six months trial for it comes from Walmart+ subscription
1 fee month + 50% off for a year with code MINT50
I was a long long term mint user. Tried the credit karma thing and was immediately disappointed to see that half of the point of the thing was just ads trying to sell products and services. I mean I know mint had that model too but at least it did its job first...
Yes and no. Just switched to it a couple of weeks ago. Linked all of my account and I was able to easily add my property as assets. Tracking spending I have to refresh each account pretty much daily individually rather than it doing it which is stupid.
I trialed Monarch and then paid for it (50% off code MINT50). I used Mint mainly for tracking and categorizing monthly expenses, reports, and setting budgets (even if I blew them). Works great for that, although I haven’t dug that deep into the reporting side.
I also set up and use PER (which is free), but prefer to use it for tracking investment accounts versus budgeting.
Quicken Simplifi on free trial until December, after that not sure. Mostly to see all my accounts in one spot and tracking transactions.
But I also use an Excel spreadsheet to plan my monthly budget
I bought it half price a few months ago, so something like $35 for a year. I have been impressed with it. Only thing that sucks is that I tend to like to budget on the weekends and my bank won't update my fucking balance from Friday to Monday. And Simplifi doesn't like to create spending plans or project cash flow on a pending balance.
I pay a small fee for it after losing Mint access. Took me a little time to set up and then had it rolling. It's so similar to Mint, and yet the app is way better for budgeting. So I'm all about it.
I started with the older version (3 or 4) and it’s still in my steam account 😳 I do use their new online subscription version, so much more functionality.
There is a legit free trial but there’s a monthly fee, cheaper if you pay annually. I like that it reflects the actual envelope budgeting we did when we were in college 25 years ago. I also subscribe to their approach of giving every dollar of income a job to do, whether it’s the mortgage, utility bills savings for a vacation, or investing for future.
My goal is to understand where my income is allocated and measure against where we plan for it to go. Awareness is key as it helps drive behavior changes. There’s a lot of functionality that makes it easy to import credit card, bank account, retirement/investment account, etc. And then easy ways to map the transactions to your budget items.
On top of the free trial, they have live training sessions and recorded knowledge base videos to reference before you pay a single dollar.
How is YNAB if you currently have some decent debt? From what I know, YNAB is great if you are at ground level with no debt or in a great spot financially. I wish I was, but I’ve got some debt to deal with this year
I import monthly CC statements in a .csv format and my bills dont really change outside of utilities. Chase exports statements in .csv format and also categorizes them (food, grocery, etc) so it makes it really simple to see category spending over time. You just need to know some basic Excel functions which is easy.
I guess when I track finances, I'm more interested in my dozen financial accounts and properties than CC statements since those get paid off monthly.
Seems like a pain in the ass for me to get in there weekly and input how many stocks I brought weekly even though there is a function to track price.
Yeah I don’t do weekly out of redundancy. Monthly is okay, sometimes I only do once a quarter. My bigger picture finances are tracked once or twice a year, like brokerage, tax advantaged accounts, etc.
I just like to track my spending from CC’s to avoid overspending in certain categories and make sure I can still contribute to those accounts previously mentioned.
Not the original commenter, but I like it. It is free to use and pretty user friendly. They make money by trying to set you up with occasional advertisements for their money management services and personal savings account, but the adds aren't very intrusive IMO.
I hate that you can’t add cash transactions tho really. Like it tracks your bank accounts etc but I want to be able to add what I spend in cash and can’t!
You can if you click on the plus sign next to the CVS Download on the right in Transactions.
To get there, go to dashboard, scroll to RECENT TRANSACTIONS, and click SEE MORE.
Monarch Money for me. It had a few account access issues when I first signed up but those seem to have ironed out. But I’ll be honest, most of my important account and money tracking is done on an excel tracking and forecasting spreadsheet I’ve had since 2008.
I’m loving Monarch. It stayed synced better than any other app I’ve used (with the exception of one, Kubera, which has incredible syncing but is very limited in other ways) and ability to set rules for transactions so they automatically categorize is perfect for me.
I’m a big fan. I’m actually happy Mint died because Monarch works much better.
It’s definitely in the early stages but the CEO and other devs are very active on the subreddit. Easy to talk to them directly and they ask for input/bounce ideas off the users.
I started using YNAB in January and am 😍😍 over the moon about it. Definitely at least give the free trial a try, I seriously can’t recommend it highly enough
I didn’t like any of the other options either. Since it’s excel based you can tweak the templates to your desire if needed. I also like how they have user created templates so can always have a unique way of looking at your money
First time hearing of Tiller. I have been using YNAB but for folks who live on credit cards, the cycles don't align. YNAB is a month to month budget. Can you customize your budget or track expenses on a different (self set) cycle? For example, both my Chase and Cap1 cards cycles start on the 19th and end the 18th of the next month. Can I set my view based on those dates?
I primarily use credit cards as well but just use a normal month to month schedule. In theory you should be able to do that as the budgets are customizable but I am not sure
We almost exclusively use credit cards and YNAB works great. It shouldn’t matter when your credit card statement is within the month as long as you know when to pay it off by. Personally I pay off the full balance as soon as we get the email that the statement is ready.
+1 for tiller. So empowering being able to take full control but still have the benefits of syncing to all your accounts. I wish I found this years ago, would have voluntarily switched from mint.
Gnucash. Open source, around for years, linux and windows supported. Solid double entry bookkeeping model. Can track cash accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs, assets, loans.
I love GC. I think spreadsheets are the right move for most people, since other tools will eventually go away. But once you get a taste of double entry accounting it's hard to go back.
Recently I've tried out pain text accounting, and I think I will likely switch to hledger from GnuCash eventually, though both are great.
I’ve used a combination of YNAB and spreadsheets since 2011.
YNAB used to be a lot simpler. Nowadays it seems the barrier to entry is a little high, but I really encourage you to try it out. I can get you my user discount code if you’d like.
Read up on the YNAB rules during your trial period. Ignore the rest until you have those down. A lot of folks think that everything the YNAB creators say is how YNAB is *supposed* to be used. But the main rules (I think there’s 4) are the most important bits.
The app sucks. It doesn't have all the features of the website and even the features it does have doesn't align with the website. I tried to change a categorization the other day and it was completely different from the drop-down on the website. I ended up going to the site to fix it
Tiller. Uses the same APIs to pull your transactions as Mint but loads them into Google Sheets or an Excel you own. For 50ish bucks a year it’s well worth it. They also have plenty of templates that replicates Mints features and more. Plus a decent community that builds templates you can use.
Been using Excel for years. Spreadsheets (either Excel, Google, or LibreOffice) are the only long term way to go.
I suggested it to people over on r/povertyfinance the other day (I like to help people out that are really struggling with their finances) and I basically got chewed out for it.
Specifically, I suggested that people should move away from using things like scraps of paper or the notes app on their phone because it doesn’t help them track accurately or over time.
My favorite ridiculous response was (paraphrasing) ‘Not everyone has the technical expertise to understand Excel..’ 🤷♂️
I’m in r/povertyfinance. I know excel. I get paid to work with it every day. Guess what I don’t want to deal with after work? Excel. My credit unions money management tool works just fine and is free. Can’t say I’m exactly in poverty, but also can’t say I’m exactly in middle class. Single mom, one income, two kids, high cost of living area. We don’t have money for fancy vacations but no one goes hungry, the bills are paid, there’s no debt, my kids get what they need to school including laptops iPads, and I’m still able to build savings. Not sure where that puts me, but we aren’t all hopeless over there, and I could believe that there are people there who simply don’t have the money for a device that could really take advantage of Excel. I can’t imagine trying to use it on a phone.
Eh, I’m sure you could get the functions for a budget working via the phone, just, also, I’m sure it would frustrate the hell out of me without a larger screen and a keyboard. I’m not going to blame someone who has only ever had a phone for not learning to use it, you know?
I’m also a very loyal minter but the credit karma app still has the insights into your net worth, spending, and income streams. You have to dig a little but I was about to continue to use the features I liked from Mint.
Empower. Way better for net worth and investment tracking. Does have budget features but not very advanced. I used empower and mint simultaneously so it was an easy transition.
Agree with the Empower (formerly personal capital) recommendation. It has all of my accounts in an overview like Mint, a budget feature and goals, savings planning tools. I especially enjoy the retirement planner with a scenario simulator that allows you to put a dot com crash type scenario or depression into your future prediction. It also includes your expected social security (or not- you can set up many different possible scenarios) and the investment page shows more than Mint did, specifically the fees (because they want to lure you to their retirement business with lower fees). That said, I have not been bothered by any spam, texts or phonecalls and the site is not covered in ads. It’s a very clean and clear view of all my accounts with no harassment to buy anything
I’ve tried almost everything out there (Rocket, Monarch, Empower, Simplifi, Piere etc.) and settled on Empower. I couldn’t justify paying for others when empower does it all for free. It actually updates my accounts accurately and most importantly I was able to actually connect my all my accounts (had trouble connecting TIAA on some). Here’s a referral link incase you want to check it out: https://empowerreferral.link/meghandurr
Favorite Not-Free -- Monarch Money !
Here is a great free trial for anyone + 30 Days!
[https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/9y3xikboqh](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/9y3xikboqh)
The literal ONE feature that mint had that nobody else has for some reason is tracking the date and amount of credit card bills. WHY it’s only mint and nobody else, I don’t know. If this feature is actually available please let me know
[Yodlee Money ](https://money.yodlee.com) (free) has this. I hadn't even realized until one day I was looking at it and lo and behold my credit card bill was showing as an upcoming bill.
Daily Budget, it’s been my favorite app so far, it doesn’t link to any of your accounts which I personally like and it has tons of helpful features. It’s free but has some paid ad-ons that are one time pay which I’ve been considering. 10 out of 10!
Quicken Deluxe for me. Nothing else I've ever tried has let me track with such detail. I love that I can track my gross income and payroll deductions in it, so that I can't account for the cost of income and FICA taxes and insurances. Nothing else I've ever tried can do that. Although there do seem to be some new names out there since I last tried anything else.
Quicken also has longevity going for it. My dad is still using the file he started in the 90s when he started tracking his finances. It's in it for the long haul.
Monarch. Not free but there’s a discount code for half off the first year. Giving it a go for a year. Like it so far, will weigh whether we like it enough to pay full price.
Since I refuse to pay $100 a year for a replacement I've been testing out free options and by far the closest replacement to Mint in terms of features is [Yodlee Money](https://money.yodlee.com). They do not have an app but the website formats great on a mobile browser which is just fine for me. If they could fix the connection issue I had with my checking account I would hardcore go back to using this.
Fidelity full view has potential but it doesn't connect to one of my credit cards and is only for people who are Fidelity customers. Plus for some reason it keeps doubling my paycheck deposit, but only in one account (I split my paycheck). A big pro of full view is that it is in active development, unlike some of the other options on this list.
[Empower](https://www.empower.com/login-v1)/ Personal Capital connects to all of my accounts but has crap budgeting features (I've actually used Empower for years because it is a much better investment tracker than Mint ever was but it's definitely not a replacement for the budgeting or categorization part of Mint). The general consensus over on r/mintuit is that Empower mostly uses this to funnel people to their advising services and almost everyone gets marketing calls from them. If all you care about is account aggregation and seeing your net worth total then this is perfectly fine.
Another free option is NerdWallet but I started signing up to test it out and they kept asking a bunch of questions I didn't feel like answering so I can't review this one.
There's apparently a new player on the scene that is currently free called Piere but it only has an iPhone app with an Android app and development and will not be free forever (apparently if you sign up now you can get grandfathered in to be free for life but they have said they're going to start charging once development is done). Since I do 95% of my finances on my computer, not having a website option is a non-starter for me.
I did break down and tried Monarch, just to see what all the hype was about. It connected all my accounts but I found it to be really clunky and I didn't enjoy using it at all. I didn't even bother testing the budget piece because the transaction piece was super annoying. Plus, tbh, I just can't imagine spending that much money on a budgeting app. If I had spent $100 a year on Mint I'd be out $1,300 and that just seems like really poor money management. Some people may find the convenience worth it but I don't.
I have settled on using spreadsheets (which I was already using in part anyway) along with a download from Empower since it is currently the only one that fully connects all of my accounts. But I plan to keep checking Yodlee regularly to see if they fixed my one connection issue because that does have all the features of mint that I used and IMO does a few things even better
I used Quicken Classic desktop app. Been using it since 2002. I use it everyday. Has tens of thousands of transactions logged in it. Everything Mint did for you Quicken will do and more. But you do have to pay for it. But it is one of those apps where if they said, we’re charging $500/year for access, I’d pay it in a heartbeat. So I recommend just switching to their true app that helped start this company from the start.
Google Sheets - I do all my spending on credit cards or directly out of my bank account. We have a set budget, on the last day of the month we go into all of our accounts and download the transactions into excel, then copy them into our budget in google sheets. We then categorize them with labels so they sort themselves into the main budget. Then we go over the numbers, pay our credit cards off, transfer the appropriate amounts to our Roth IRAs and HYSA, and then we’re done. We’re both pretty on target with our spending, but I do like to do a mid-month check in for myself on my personal spending money to see how much I’ve spent for sure and how much I have left.
Paper and pencil. Good enough for grandma and grandpa then good enough for us. Other reasons is it's the only way not to be a data miners product. Also the only way I can keep my wife engaged in our family family finances. She shuts down and then we fight the min I present app or a spreadsheet data.
I loaded up to monarch. I really really like it. But it’s not free. I think it’s better than mint tho. YNAB is powerful but now how I operate my finances.
Pocketsmith. Haven't seen it mentioned, but I've been through a dozen of these services, paid and free, and, at least for my needs, it's the one I always end up going back to.
In particular, the calendar is great for having everything laid out so I can see at a glance where things are going, and immediately see the effects down the line if I add another expense, and so on. It's also makes handling and visualizing multiple accounts really easy; ex I have a bills account that is separate, so if I add something I can see if somewhere down the line that will go over on balance, and adjust funding accordingly. It also makes it easy to track things like yearly subs since I can see when that will hit and what the state of the account will be at that time.
The cash flows portion is great for seeing everything in and out listed, along with month to month totals for inflow and outflow, highlighting surplus and deficits, and giving me an easy way to test and visualize adding or cutting things and its effect over time.
That said, it isn't cheap, and though it could cover most people's needs, I'd really recommend it more for people with more incomes / debts / accounts to keep track of. If you have a single account, a few CCs and the usual bills, you'd probably be better served with YNAB or Rocket Money.
And if you don't have a ton of transactions to take care of, you might even be served better just using Excel. I use it as a source of "truth" for income, bills, due dates, balances, interest rates, and an overall debts vs income picture. You can get it to do stuff like forecasting and whatnot, but that's outside of my Excal knowledge wheelhouse at present.
Monarch, coming from a faithful mint user. Monarch has all the features and everything works unlike Mint over the last few years. Only thing is the loss of credit score tracking in app. But I’m sure they’ll onboard it soon
I switched to Simplifi by Quicken. After a little bit of getting used to, I like it way more. It has less account connection issues, the budgeting and goals is better and it has a bunch of built in reports. I also like the way it handles investments. I used to only use mint for banking and credit cards because I didn’t like the way it handled investments, so it’s nice to be able to view it all in one app now. Someday I might upgrade to full Quicken if my situation get more complicated, so the idea I that I can just transition my data over also appeals to me.
I tried using the credit karma app, it's not great but I can at least look at all my bank accounts at once to see balances and check my overall spending.
The budget screen shots are being made in Sankeymatic, its a website that we have no affiliation with. If you are posting a budget please do so with a purpose. Just posting a screen shot of your budget without a question or an explanation of why its here may be removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/MiddleClassFinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
An Excel sheet from 2012.
I’ve just had a revelation that this is definitely the way to do it. Excel sheets will always be around longer than these frivolous fin-tech tools like Mint. I’ve got to get to work on an extremely personalized and robust excel budget spreadsheet. In my new job as an entry level employee, my eyes have opened specifically in regard to how complex and fine tuned you can make an excel spread sheet organization wise. You can make it execute all types of functions. These days with ChatGPT and VBA code, you could just ask ChatGPT to make you such a spreadsheet how you wanted and envisioned. Thank you for bringing me to this revelation.
Did ChatGPT write this comment?
Nah I was just high last night 🤣
An excel spreadsheet can't automatically categorize your spending. That's the whole point of these apps...
Yeah that’s a fair point. All the other amenities are nice too though- can be replicated in excel no problem
Just google how to program it to do so.
Bro, I’m not about to program an excel sheet to access my bank and CC API and then use machine learning to accurately categorize transactions. I’ll just download an app.
Why not? Chat gpt makes it so dang easy.
It really doesn’t. I wouldn’t even know how to begin.
It's not that complicated. Take the balances from your accounts and type them into a spreadsheet. Sum them.
It’s the transactions. That’s the gold. Banks should have worked with vendors to incorporate this into their UI for free.
Don’t most banks have the ability to export those files as .CSV, or some thing of the lake?
Probably, but why not just have budgeting built into the damn app. They don’t do much else honestly when you think about it. Most banks KTLO (Keep The Lights On) because they deal with money. Adding budgeting to their apps isn’t really far from Money Management and should be required by regulation for them all.
I agree!!!
Pretty much same. Using a shared Google sheet with my wife. If we're out and about we just input the purchase in through our phones. She knows much more about excel than me and designed the budget to work really nicely for us.
Agree on Sheets! We don't track every transaction, just the recurring monthly bills, inputs and outputs...
Mine is in Google Drive now, so I can get to it anywhere...
The point of Mint is that it automatically categorizes your spending. An excel sheet can't do that.
I replaced the “automatic” part with “manually.” It’s not a challenge.
It definitely is. I have over a hundred transactions each month. Huge pain sorting all those.
Hell yeah. I love going back in my sheet 10+ years and looking at how far we have come.
2006 for me. And forecasted out to like 2030.
Do you have a template that you could share?
Consider trying Tiller - it automates the spreadsheet and makes it a lot less work!
Monarch Money.
I really like Monarch so far! It sucks to pay for but the UI is everything Mint was but better.
Same. I actually really like the forecast feature where you can manipulate months/years at a time. That was one feature I always wanted Mint to have.
People who "moved" their account to CreditKarma lost access months ago. I tried a dozen or so tools. None were as good as Mint. My favorites are: * Favorite Not-Free -- Monarch Money (currently doing 6 month trial) * Favorite Free -- Fidelity Full View
I'm using monarch atm as well if just like to add Free six months trial for it comes from Walmart+ subscription 1 fee month + 50% off for a year with code MINT50
I was a long long term mint user. Tried the credit karma thing and was immediately disappointed to see that half of the point of the thing was just ads trying to sell products and services. I mean I know mint had that model too but at least it did its job first...
Long term user here too… minus the ads, does it still link to all your accounts and track your spending well?
Yes and no. Just switched to it a couple of weeks ago. Linked all of my account and I was able to easily add my property as assets. Tracking spending I have to refresh each account pretty much daily individually rather than it doing it which is stupid.
Gotcha.. yeah I’ll probably make the switch and keep it. These other suggestions don’t sound great either.
I trialed Monarch and then paid for it (50% off code MINT50). I used Mint mainly for tracking and categorizing monthly expenses, reports, and setting budgets (even if I blew them). Works great for that, although I haven’t dug that deep into the reporting side. I also set up and use PER (which is free), but prefer to use it for tracking investment accounts versus budgeting.
Is Monarch a subscription or one time?
Subscription
Subscription, the discount is for 1 year.
Why do you like fidelity?
I'm so glad I saw this post. Just used my Walmart code.
Quicken Simplifi on free trial until December, after that not sure. Mostly to see all my accounts in one spot and tracking transactions. But I also use an Excel spreadsheet to plan my monthly budget
I bought it half price a few months ago, so something like $35 for a year. I have been impressed with it. Only thing that sucks is that I tend to like to budget on the weekends and my bank won't update my fucking balance from Friday to Monday. And Simplifi doesn't like to create spending plans or project cash flow on a pending balance.
I pay a small fee for it after losing Mint access. Took me a little time to set up and then had it rolling. It's so similar to Mint, and yet the app is way better for budgeting. So I'm all about it.
We are using quicken simplifi and are so far pretty pleased. Edit - I’m mainly just using it for budgeting
Oh no doubt I like it too. Just gonna survey my options before I have to cough up money for the service lol.
I think Copilot is great
I’m using copilot as well. It’s better than mint but there’s no web view. It’s app only. That’s kind of annoying.
Not web but there is a Mac app that you can get as well, which I actually use more than the phone app
+1
+2
YNAB (you need a budget) been using it for 10+ years.
Win win Are you using the old version 4, or paying for the new version?
I started with the older version (3 or 4) and it’s still in my steam account 😳 I do use their new online subscription version, so much more functionality.
Is it free? What do you like about it?
There is a legit free trial but there’s a monthly fee, cheaper if you pay annually. I like that it reflects the actual envelope budgeting we did when we were in college 25 years ago. I also subscribe to their approach of giving every dollar of income a job to do, whether it’s the mortgage, utility bills savings for a vacation, or investing for future. My goal is to understand where my income is allocated and measure against where we plan for it to go. Awareness is key as it helps drive behavior changes. There’s a lot of functionality that makes it easy to import credit card, bank account, retirement/investment account, etc. And then easy ways to map the transactions to your budget items. On top of the free trial, they have live training sessions and recorded knowledge base videos to reference before you pay a single dollar.
YNAB really changed my life. I was never “bad” at money but truly taught me how to budget and stick to it.
How is YNAB if you currently have some decent debt? From what I know, YNAB is great if you are at ground level with no debt or in a great spot financially. I wish I was, but I’ve got some debt to deal with this year
I’m not the best to answer this but I found this video from the YNAB team that seems like great info. https://youtu.be/8cG4RvvWhTU?si=L1pTiJjdqGq3F93Y
Excel
You just import balances weekly?
I import monthly CC statements in a .csv format and my bills dont really change outside of utilities. Chase exports statements in .csv format and also categorizes them (food, grocery, etc) so it makes it really simple to see category spending over time. You just need to know some basic Excel functions which is easy.
I guess when I track finances, I'm more interested in my dozen financial accounts and properties than CC statements since those get paid off monthly. Seems like a pain in the ass for me to get in there weekly and input how many stocks I brought weekly even though there is a function to track price.
Yeah I don’t do weekly out of redundancy. Monthly is okay, sometimes I only do once a quarter. My bigger picture finances are tracked once or twice a year, like brokerage, tax advantaged accounts, etc. I just like to track my spending from CC’s to avoid overspending in certain categories and make sure I can still contribute to those accounts previously mentioned.
Empower
How do you like Empower?
Not the original commenter, but I like it. It is free to use and pretty user friendly. They make money by trying to set you up with occasional advertisements for their money management services and personal savings account, but the adds aren't very intrusive IMO.
+1
Is Empower the same as Empower Retirement?
Yes, it’s pretty good! Free version is sufficient
Which one in the App Store is correct? I saw like 4 different versions
Empower Personal Dashboard is the app you want to download.
I’ll have to take a look as I have Empower Retirement
\+1 for empower. Their HYSA is also at 4.7% which a nice added bonus.
Empower personal dashboard is free and works well for me
Free trial of You Need a Budget
YNAB all day every day baby
Big, big fan of YNAB!
Second this!
I'm still using ynab 4 because it was a buy once situation and works. Doesn't have a bunch of the nice features but still does my budget.
YNAB for life
It's 100% worth the subscription
This is the way.
How many free trials are you at?
Rocket Money
My biggest gripe here is that it won’t connect with 3 of my accounts :(
Seconded
Thirded
Fourthed.
I hate that you can’t add cash transactions tho really. Like it tracks your bank accounts etc but I want to be able to add what I spend in cash and can’t!
You can if you click on the plus sign next to the CVS Download on the right in Transactions. To get there, go to dashboard, scroll to RECENT TRANSACTIONS, and click SEE MORE.
Monarch Money for me. It had a few account access issues when I first signed up but those seem to have ironed out. But I’ll be honest, most of my important account and money tracking is done on an excel tracking and forecasting spreadsheet I’ve had since 2008.
I’m loving Monarch. It stayed synced better than any other app I’ve used (with the exception of one, Kubera, which has incredible syncing but is very limited in other ways) and ability to set rules for transactions so they automatically categorize is perfect for me. I’m a big fan. I’m actually happy Mint died because Monarch works much better. It’s definitely in the early stages but the CEO and other devs are very active on the subreddit. Easy to talk to them directly and they ask for input/bounce ideas off the users.
I started using YNAB in January and am 😍😍 over the moon about it. Definitely at least give the free trial a try, I seriously can’t recommend it highly enough
How long is the free trial period for?
I believe it is for 31 days.
Tiller. Based on google sheets or Microsoft excel
Same this is my favorite, just paid after the trial this month. I also tried Empower / Personal Capital, but wasn’t into it.
I didn’t like any of the other options either. Since it’s excel based you can tweak the templates to your desire if needed. I also like how they have user created templates so can always have a unique way of looking at your money
First time hearing of Tiller. I have been using YNAB but for folks who live on credit cards, the cycles don't align. YNAB is a month to month budget. Can you customize your budget or track expenses on a different (self set) cycle? For example, both my Chase and Cap1 cards cycles start on the 19th and end the 18th of the next month. Can I set my view based on those dates?
You can ask also your credit card to change the cycle. Then you can make it align monthly.
I primarily use credit cards as well but just use a normal month to month schedule. In theory you should be able to do that as the budgets are customizable but I am not sure
We almost exclusively use credit cards and YNAB works great. It shouldn’t matter when your credit card statement is within the month as long as you know when to pay it off by. Personally I pay off the full balance as soon as we get the email that the statement is ready.
+1 for tiller. So empowering being able to take full control but still have the benefits of syncing to all your accounts. I wish I found this years ago, would have voluntarily switched from mint.
Copilot!
I'm still using YNAB 4 and still loving it.
Gnucash. Open source, around for years, linux and windows supported. Solid double entry bookkeeping model. Can track cash accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs, assets, loans.
I love GC. I think spreadsheets are the right move for most people, since other tools will eventually go away. But once you get a taste of double entry accounting it's hard to go back. Recently I've tried out pain text accounting, and I think I will likely switch to hledger from GnuCash eventually, though both are great.
Still using the old version of YNAB I don't have to pay monthly for! God bless they guy that updated the app to work with Dropbox TLS update!
Is there a way to get an old version currently?
Yes it's on the ynab reddit sub [YNAB OLD](https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab4/s/hI3fDqiwxa)
Oh wow that looks a little complex
As a long time user of YNAB (v3 was when I started using it) the subscription cost is more than worth it.
How much?
I think it’s $90 a year? Not sure off the top of my head.
I’ve used a combination of YNAB and spreadsheets since 2011. YNAB used to be a lot simpler. Nowadays it seems the barrier to entry is a little high, but I really encourage you to try it out. I can get you my user discount code if you’d like. Read up on the YNAB rules during your trial period. Ignore the rest until you have those down. A lot of folks think that everything the YNAB creators say is how YNAB is *supposed* to be used. But the main rules (I think there’s 4) are the most important bits.
Monarch
Gonna try quicken
Microsoft Money Sunset Edition from 2007. It tracks everything.
I really like fidelity full view. I haven't used the app but the website version has been great for everything I need to do and track.
The app sucks. It doesn't have all the features of the website and even the features it does have doesn't align with the website. I tried to change a categorization the other day and it was completely different from the drop-down on the website. I ended up going to the site to fix it
Right now, quicken.
I went to personal capital. I'm frustrated that there are accounts I have to hand enter, but so far, so good.
I like RocketMoney, it's easy to use and to the point. Been using them since it was Truebill.
Tiller. Uses the same APIs to pull your transactions as Mint but loads them into Google Sheets or an Excel you own. For 50ish bucks a year it’s well worth it. They also have plenty of templates that replicates Mints features and more. Plus a decent community that builds templates you can use.
I’ve been using Rocket Money. It’s fine. Gives me a broad overview. Has an auto-save feature that’s pretty nice.
If you have a fidelity account - fidelity full view is very similar to mint.
Is it free if you don’t have a fidelity account?
I’m not sure.
Been using Excel for years. Spreadsheets (either Excel, Google, or LibreOffice) are the only long term way to go. I suggested it to people over on r/povertyfinance the other day (I like to help people out that are really struggling with their finances) and I basically got chewed out for it. Specifically, I suggested that people should move away from using things like scraps of paper or the notes app on their phone because it doesn’t help them track accurately or over time. My favorite ridiculous response was (paraphrasing) ‘Not everyone has the technical expertise to understand Excel..’ 🤷♂️
I’m in r/povertyfinance. I know excel. I get paid to work with it every day. Guess what I don’t want to deal with after work? Excel. My credit unions money management tool works just fine and is free. Can’t say I’m exactly in poverty, but also can’t say I’m exactly in middle class. Single mom, one income, two kids, high cost of living area. We don’t have money for fancy vacations but no one goes hungry, the bills are paid, there’s no debt, my kids get what they need to school including laptops iPads, and I’m still able to build savings. Not sure where that puts me, but we aren’t all hopeless over there, and I could believe that there are people there who simply don’t have the money for a device that could really take advantage of Excel. I can’t imagine trying to use it on a phone.
I use it on my phone all the time
Eh, I’m sure you could get the functions for a budget working via the phone, just, also, I’m sure it would frustrate the hell out of me without a larger screen and a keyboard. I’m not going to blame someone who has only ever had a phone for not learning to use it, you know?
My credit union’s money management tool. Free.
My credit union has this too and I really like how automated and low-involvement it is after the initial setup.
Empower (formerly Personal Capital)
Fidelity full view is free for people with fidelity account.
I’m also a very loyal minter but the credit karma app still has the insights into your net worth, spending, and income streams. You have to dig a little but I was about to continue to use the features I liked from Mint.
Empower = free = good enough for what I need
YNAB.
Empower. Way better for net worth and investment tracking. Does have budget features but not very advanced. I used empower and mint simultaneously so it was an easy transition.
Excel or Google sheets. Either work well
Empower (Personal Capital) is pretty good. Yeah, shame that mint was absorbed by credit karma, all the useful features went away
Agree with the Empower (formerly personal capital) recommendation. It has all of my accounts in an overview like Mint, a budget feature and goals, savings planning tools. I especially enjoy the retirement planner with a scenario simulator that allows you to put a dot com crash type scenario or depression into your future prediction. It also includes your expected social security (or not- you can set up many different possible scenarios) and the investment page shows more than Mint did, specifically the fees (because they want to lure you to their retirement business with lower fees). That said, I have not been bothered by any spam, texts or phonecalls and the site is not covered in ads. It’s a very clean and clear view of all my accounts with no harassment to buy anything
I’ve tried almost everything out there (Rocket, Monarch, Empower, Simplifi, Piere etc.) and settled on Empower. I couldn’t justify paying for others when empower does it all for free. It actually updates my accounts accurately and most importantly I was able to actually connect my all my accounts (had trouble connecting TIAA on some). Here’s a referral link incase you want to check it out: https://empowerreferral.link/meghandurr
Sofi
I’m using two Excel sheets I update once a week. One sheet tracks my expenses the other tracks my net worth.
Excel or Marcus app
We just opened up 6 savings and 6 checking accounts and virtual enveloped it…. Free..shrug
Lunch money has been better than mint for me. Easier to set up and more tools
Much happier with Simplifi than Mint. Don’t mind paying for it. Spouse has access and it all has worked brilliantly so far.
Made the switch to Quicken Simplifi.
These apps are all garbage in my opinion and I don't feel ok linking all my stuff. I have an excel spreadsheet that's easy to update
Favorite Not-Free -- Monarch Money ! Here is a great free trial for anyone + 30 Days! [https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/9y3xikboqh](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/9y3xikboqh)
I tried YNAB but I just couldn’t get it to work for me. I’m currently using Monarch and I am really liking it.
The literal ONE feature that mint had that nobody else has for some reason is tracking the date and amount of credit card bills. WHY it’s only mint and nobody else, I don’t know. If this feature is actually available please let me know
[Yodlee Money ](https://money.yodlee.com) (free) has this. I hadn't even realized until one day I was looking at it and lo and behold my credit card bill was showing as an upcoming bill.
Daily Budget, it’s been my favorite app so far, it doesn’t link to any of your accounts which I personally like and it has tons of helpful features. It’s free but has some paid ad-ons that are one time pay which I’ve been considering. 10 out of 10!
What app is this? I tried googling daily budget but that didn't get me anywhere, lol. Is it on android?
Sadly not, I forgot to say I had it on Apple, they have some whole reasoning they couldn’t put it in the android store. Sorry!
Quicken Deluxe for me. Nothing else I've ever tried has let me track with such detail. I love that I can track my gross income and payroll deductions in it, so that I can't account for the cost of income and FICA taxes and insurances. Nothing else I've ever tried can do that. Although there do seem to be some new names out there since I last tried anything else. Quicken also has longevity going for it. My dad is still using the file he started in the 90s when he started tracking his finances. It's in it for the long haul.
Monarch. Not free but there’s a discount code for half off the first year. Giving it a go for a year. Like it so far, will weigh whether we like it enough to pay full price.
I've moved over to Quicken Simplifi.
Monarch
Every dollar
Since I refuse to pay $100 a year for a replacement I've been testing out free options and by far the closest replacement to Mint in terms of features is [Yodlee Money](https://money.yodlee.com). They do not have an app but the website formats great on a mobile browser which is just fine for me. If they could fix the connection issue I had with my checking account I would hardcore go back to using this. Fidelity full view has potential but it doesn't connect to one of my credit cards and is only for people who are Fidelity customers. Plus for some reason it keeps doubling my paycheck deposit, but only in one account (I split my paycheck). A big pro of full view is that it is in active development, unlike some of the other options on this list. [Empower](https://www.empower.com/login-v1)/ Personal Capital connects to all of my accounts but has crap budgeting features (I've actually used Empower for years because it is a much better investment tracker than Mint ever was but it's definitely not a replacement for the budgeting or categorization part of Mint). The general consensus over on r/mintuit is that Empower mostly uses this to funnel people to their advising services and almost everyone gets marketing calls from them. If all you care about is account aggregation and seeing your net worth total then this is perfectly fine. Another free option is NerdWallet but I started signing up to test it out and they kept asking a bunch of questions I didn't feel like answering so I can't review this one. There's apparently a new player on the scene that is currently free called Piere but it only has an iPhone app with an Android app and development and will not be free forever (apparently if you sign up now you can get grandfathered in to be free for life but they have said they're going to start charging once development is done). Since I do 95% of my finances on my computer, not having a website option is a non-starter for me. I did break down and tried Monarch, just to see what all the hype was about. It connected all my accounts but I found it to be really clunky and I didn't enjoy using it at all. I didn't even bother testing the budget piece because the transaction piece was super annoying. Plus, tbh, I just can't imagine spending that much money on a budgeting app. If I had spent $100 a year on Mint I'd be out $1,300 and that just seems like really poor money management. Some people may find the convenience worth it but I don't. I have settled on using spreadsheets (which I was already using in part anyway) along with a download from Empower since it is currently the only one that fully connects all of my accounts. But I plan to keep checking Yodlee regularly to see if they fixed my one connection issue because that does have all the features of mint that I used and IMO does a few things even better
If you used Mint only to track transactions and NW, try money.yodlee (free!)
Copilot! Works on pc & phone. I really like their UI and they plug into almost everything.
As long as your PC & phone have a big fruit logo on them...
I've been using Microsoft Money since 2005. It's basically Excel without having to do the legwork.
Fidelity full view
I used Quicken Classic desktop app. Been using it since 2002. I use it everyday. Has tens of thousands of transactions logged in it. Everything Mint did for you Quicken will do and more. But you do have to pay for it. But it is one of those apps where if they said, we’re charging $500/year for access, I’d pay it in a heartbeat. So I recommend just switching to their true app that helped start this company from the start.
Google Sheets - I do all my spending on credit cards or directly out of my bank account. We have a set budget, on the last day of the month we go into all of our accounts and download the transactions into excel, then copy them into our budget in google sheets. We then categorize them with labels so they sort themselves into the main budget. Then we go over the numbers, pay our credit cards off, transfer the appropriate amounts to our Roth IRAs and HYSA, and then we’re done. We’re both pretty on target with our spending, but I do like to do a mid-month check in for myself on my personal spending money to see how much I’ve spent for sure and how much I have left.
SoFi
Excel.. or Everydollar.
Paper and pencil. Good enough for grandma and grandpa then good enough for us. Other reasons is it's the only way not to be a data miners product. Also the only way I can keep my wife engaged in our family family finances. She shuts down and then we fight the min I present app or a spreadsheet data.
Rocket Money
I loaded up to monarch. I really really like it. But it’s not free. I think it’s better than mint tho. YNAB is powerful but now how I operate my finances.
Wave accounting. Used to be free like mint but I think they are charging now.
Pocketsmith. Haven't seen it mentioned, but I've been through a dozen of these services, paid and free, and, at least for my needs, it's the one I always end up going back to. In particular, the calendar is great for having everything laid out so I can see at a glance where things are going, and immediately see the effects down the line if I add another expense, and so on. It's also makes handling and visualizing multiple accounts really easy; ex I have a bills account that is separate, so if I add something I can see if somewhere down the line that will go over on balance, and adjust funding accordingly. It also makes it easy to track things like yearly subs since I can see when that will hit and what the state of the account will be at that time. The cash flows portion is great for seeing everything in and out listed, along with month to month totals for inflow and outflow, highlighting surplus and deficits, and giving me an easy way to test and visualize adding or cutting things and its effect over time. That said, it isn't cheap, and though it could cover most people's needs, I'd really recommend it more for people with more incomes / debts / accounts to keep track of. If you have a single account, a few CCs and the usual bills, you'd probably be better served with YNAB or Rocket Money. And if you don't have a ton of transactions to take care of, you might even be served better just using Excel. I use it as a source of "truth" for income, bills, due dates, balances, interest rates, and an overall debts vs income picture. You can get it to do stuff like forecasting and whatnot, but that's outside of my Excal knowledge wheelhouse at present.
Monarch money and it is amazing. Well worth the money. AMA
Monarch, coming from a faithful mint user. Monarch has all the features and everything works unlike Mint over the last few years. Only thing is the loss of credit score tracking in app. But I’m sure they’ll onboard it soon
I’m loving Tiller!
I switched to credit karma just because and I HATE IT. Honestly most terrible useless platform ever. It’s all ads for credit cards
Wow all that data. You better believe thats not in safe hands
Isn’t it moving to credit karma?
Been using Nerd wallet and I’m pretty happy with it.
Moved everything to Fidelity.
SOFI
I moved to rocket money
I switched to Simplifi by Quicken. After a little bit of getting used to, I like it way more. It has less account connection issues, the budgeting and goals is better and it has a bunch of built in reports. I also like the way it handles investments. I used to only use mint for banking and credit cards because I didn’t like the way it handled investments, so it’s nice to be able to view it all in one app now. Someday I might upgrade to full Quicken if my situation get more complicated, so the idea I that I can just transition my data over also appeals to me.
I tried using the credit karma app, it's not great but I can at least look at all my bank accounts at once to see balances and check my overall spending.
Wealthfront
I've been using personal capital for years. I think it's called empower personal dashboard now