Personal Finance Software Options

[James Free]

I've been a big fan of Mint.com for years. It allows me to track everything I have, categorize, export, and graph. I can set budgets and goals. It has a smooth browser and smartphone experience. It syncs real-estate with zillow, updates my credit score, and even tracks the value of my car. It allows me to create and track progress against a monthly budget, or against savings goals. It allows for custom transaction categories and custom transaction tags, and you can save transaction classification rules so you don't have to edit recurring transactions manually. It consolidates data much better than any service I had previously seen, and its transaction export is moderately useful (useable, at least) for getting data into tax prep software or other business expense software (hint: custom tag for each property!).

Trouble is, Mint has been in decline for a while now. Two-factor's proliferation has been the main culprit - every day it wants me to re-enter a dozen security codes. This isn't really Mint's fault, and the security is good, but it really hurts the experience. But there are other problems. Mint keeps trying to update closed accounts, such as mortgages that were sold to other providers. Some accounts just fail to sync and grind forever. I've opened tickets with Mint's support people, but they've had no answers, and they tend to just drop the issues. Deleting accounts, as opposed to closing them, deletes all of their history, and there is no undo! It has also never supported the ability to edit historical balances. Want to tell it that your cash stash's value was wrong three months ago? Too bad!

As a software developer, I met some Intuit people at a recent conference, and they admitted (very off the record) that Mint is an afterthought at Intuit. I expect its decline to continue.

This has led me to search for a replacement. Quickbooks is a popular choice for business management, but it sucks for personal finance. No brokerage account or credit card syncing? That's... most of my personal financial activity right there. YNAB? Worst of both worlds. Quicken? Desktop software-only is a nonstarter. NerdWallet? Not even close.

The one obvious comparable to Mint, then, is Personal Capital. I built a profile in PC years ago but abandoned it for being inferior to Mint at the time. Since then, it seems to have improved. I particularly liked that I can add my wife as a second person and mark accounts as mine, hers, or joint. The reporting beats Mint, particularly the stock trending and comparisons. It handles two-factor and login retries more cleanly and unobtrusively than Mint does now. It has added Zillow integration for real-estate. You can now (FINALLY!) add a "manual account" for tracking things that aren't supported by PC, and it supports custom transaction categories.

However, there are some big reasons why I can't migrate from Mint to PC. The biggest one, a total dealbreaker, is that it doesn't allow for transaction import or manual transaction creation. At all. There is literally no way to migrate my years of history from Mint to PC. Unless I continue to update Mint, I'll have no long-term contiguous record of my transactions and balances. PC also doesn't track/show my credit score. Or my car (less of an issue). It doesn't have anything at all for budgeting. Simply signing up for PC subjects me to phone harassment from their investment advisors, who are desperate to get me to pay for financial advice (their business model). In short, PC is for stock investors to track their stock investing (and pay for advice on it). It's a niche, and it's not my niche.

Mint is still my best option, even as its quality declines. I may try to keep both Mint and PC updated going forward just in case things change, but I am frustrated by the lack of better options, even if I'm willing to pay for them.

Has anyone learned anything about this space that I'm missing?