Mint: Budget & Expense Manager Reviews

by Kreestole

What the heck this app? I’ve had Mint since it was this app Bills and it was great. You took away that app and merged it with this app, which wasn’t as great and had a lot of features I wasn’t looking for. I kept this app and learned to deal with the busy screens and finicky updating of accounts and waited while all the glitches worked themselves out, but I started looking for an alternative app for paying bills that functioned like the old Bill app because you guys ruined that feature and that is the only reason I used Mint . I used this app alongside another app over the last year or so, I only kept this app because it had more of my billers set up and that made paying them easier than the new app. Well now that you are taking away the bill paying feature, I’ve deleted Mint altogether and am using my alternate app, despite it not having the ability to connect to a couple of my billers. You left us no choice, no one wants to go to each biller’s website and pay anymore, and most online banking bill pay lacks the features Mint and the this app Bills app had that I wanted, like being able to see the bill amounts broken up by biller in order by due date, especially on a tablet or phone. Thanks a lot for forcing us to convert to this app from Bills and then ruining Mint too. There are so many apps like this app that don’t feature bill pay, you’re making a mistake. I hope you bring it back someday. Or even better, bring back the this app Bills app.

by Cheeryinmay

It used to be a nice app, but this year they failed twice at connecting to bank accounts. Don't take me wrong! I mean constantly not refreshing the balance for days and two months (I canceled the first account while the second account hasn't been fixed by their tech team for more than 2 months now, and I'm still waiting). They must have bugs in the system especially if you try to connect with two account of the same bank, which I believe many married couples do. I have wasted at least 10 hours, literally, in total on tens of emails and live chatting. Yes, they don't have phone call service:( The email customer service representative only asks you questions you have answered many times as if they cannot access previous conversation. For example, I was asked whether the two accounts have the same credential for four time in each case of my two issues. They can also ask you to try something that has been tried many time. Apparently, they just don't want to solve your problem, because your reply will not go to the same person again but randomly someone else. So they just need to say something and their job is done. For Mint design, I don't understand why they don't allow you set in-app alert off. For example, I know my backup checking has a low balance and I don't care! I don't need to see low-balance alert constantly. Lastly, if you want to refresh again 10 min after the last refreshing, it won't do it!

by Texas Mint User

As a longtime this app user (6+years), I've watched Mint go from helpful to becoming something that is so riddled with ads that it's practically useless. The most recent update solidified this in my book. Several of the displays are half taken up by ads. It's so difficult to even see where your money is going since many of the pages are screaming "apply for this credit card (that's paying us for ad space)" or "invest your money here (again, paid ad space)." It's so disheartening to watch Mint go from something I trusted for my every budgeting need to being something that's practically useless. I've mentioned many times before (during the repeated in-app "rate our app" requests) that I'd love to see a paid version so I could ditch the ads, but that hasn't happened. I'm actually willing to PAY for Mint to ditch the ads, but they seem to think that half of their screen space sold to other companies is a better way to do business. It's disheartening, frustrating, and downright greedy. I'd love to see a response from this app (which I've requested before), but they're too busy cooking up ways for additional profit to actually respond to loyal customers. And right after I submitted this, I noticed that their screenshot previews in Mint Store didn't even show the most recent, janky version of Mint! Instead, it showed the previous, actually useful version of Mint ...where I knew where my money was actually going.

by Aegraphic

I was really hopeful when I downloaded Mint, but it’s more aggravating than anything. The remote account connections (the feature that’s supposed to allow this app to keep track of your accounts and balances and read your transactions for budgeting) routinely fails. For example, I just spent 20 minutes clicking back and forth between Capital One and this app, because this app reported that my permission for Capital One ended. No matter how many times I authorized the access (on Capital One), I got returned to the same screen (on this app) where I was asked to go to Capital One to authorize this app. Other accounts also intermittently do this. So if you’re hoping for a good way to track multiple accounts, this isn’t it.

The other aggravating element of Mint is its categorization of transactions. Every one of my paychecks is labeled a state tax return, and no matter how many of them I re-categorize, this app doesn’t learn from my changes. My groceries are labeled “shopping”, and apparently I get a tax return every other week (according to this app), so I have to go in and re-categorize transactions repeatedly. These categories are used for budgeting, so this app reports I have “low cash flow” (because it doesn’t recognize my paycheck), or that I overspent on my “shopping” budget (I don’t have a “shopping budget- I bought some food).

Between these two issues, I can’t track my balances nor create an actual tracked budget using this app. Deleting.

by Jim19406

UPDATE:
I went to the article linked in the developer response, and it was totally inapplicable. It explained how to add a manual transaction to an existing account. That’s not what I asked about, or the feature I requested. If this app has chosen not to support Apple Card, they should support off-line accounts that would have manually (or better, as I originally suggested, imported) transactions. Until this app allows me to capture a complete, accurate picture of my financial position, it’s worthless. I run a lot of spend through Apple Card and it’s not captured at all! Even the monthly payments to Apple Card aren’t recorded, making my monthly spend look artificially low.

Intuit keeps investing in “redesigning” Mint to add new features, yet they’ve been stubbornly unresponsive to requests to add major financial institutions and credit cards. For example, MetLife spun off BrightHouse Financial. Since this app has always supported MetLife, you’d think support for BrightHouse Financial would be a no-brainer? Nope. Over two years and this app still hasn’t heard of BrightHouse Financial. Another great example - Apple Card. Ok, I’ll buy that maybe Apple won’t let this app connect to them. In fact, that might make me feel better. But Apple does allow downloading of transactions. Yet this app hasn’t mastered the concept of manually importing transactions? How long has Intuit owned them? Maybe focus on the basics before trying to add flashy features.

by Booookkkksss

Mint definitely does what I wanted it to. However there are a few things that make it very hard to use. First the UX is way off for the tabs, the common actions from the overview tab should be spread out into the other tabs because I see myself only using this one tab 95% of the time and scrolling up and down for the common actions is a pain. Maybe add a side menu to make it much easier to select these. Second, it feels like it’s lacking the historical overview and analysis that I want with an app like this. I can add a budget for the current month for something new like bills but this new budget does not get applied to the previous month so I’m unable to see it. This budget should also allow a view to see your trends on it. Another pain is the [Month] Spending section. I can’t view previous months only the current one and when a new month comes You are stuck to only seeing those couple days of transactions. This is very troubling given that the graphs and info provided in this section are very well made yet under utilized. Please update these things and I will consider increasing my rating

TL:DR Mint is great for looking at your spending habits yet lacks several features to look into trends and historical data, this restricts it to really only working as a budget tool and makes it nearly impossible to make new analysis on spending habits that haven’t been predefined

by XKH2019

I’ve used this app for four or five years now because it’s the budgeting system that works for me, starting in college and moving into adult life. But the major problem I continue to have is this app’s interface continues to refresh the categories I set for particular reoccurring charges - for instance, one monthly payment plan charge continues to be set by this app as “doctor”, instead of the payment plan budget category. So in order to see how my over budget is doing each month, I have to go into individual purchases and reset each category every time I open Mint . I have reset categories both by mobile phone (which is my main contact with this app) and by desktop browser, and neither platform fixes the issue.
This is also a weird problem with payment app charges like PayPal, which all show up as “shopping” by this app. I can go in and manually designate one charge as “groceries” “rent” or “gift” and the next say it will refresh the category as “shopping.” This is a pain. It factors into my decision to recommend to others, and if I were running more than a 1-person household it would be nearly unusable for the amount of time it’s supposed to take. Highly recommend this app addresses categories so I can permanently “set and forget” reoccurring charges in budgets, as well as permanently recategorize individual purchases without affecting future charges by the same payment platform.

by Readymaderiot

this app has been a solid app for keeping an eye on our finances. Account refreshes still have issues, but are way more stable and reliable than they used to be. Given, the immense amount of personal data they collect about us, the financial insight features feel shallow but flashy. It’s easy to set goals then completely ignore them. The goals functionality itself is outdated. Investment data seems wrong with no way to add/edit/correct info about holdings in the portfolio. There’s no useful functionality around retirement planning (blogs don’t count).

Biggest gripe is the Ad filled Ad-free plan. It’s just a buck a month, but the misleading description has soured my experience and trust for Intuit. If you subscribe, the marketplace page with all its third-party offers is still around and you will continue to have large portions of the home and notification pages dedicated to ads for Intuit’s other products like bill-negotiation (also a third party). Finally and most importantly, you will not be saved from full page pop-up ads upon logging in about Turbo Tax ‘offers’ that must be dismissed before you can use your ad-free app (Turbo Tax is a ripoff, btw).

this app is a fine app and I expected to have an even better experience after turning off ads, but that dollar per month doesn’t change much. Paying for this app actually left me feeling tricked and less satisfied with the product.

by Sassyteg

I’m annoyed by how ANY little message/offer/notification (includes pop-up or message center) from a creditor’s or service provider’s website will block Mint from refreshing account info. Every time I’ve tried to check these “messages” it just takes me to the this app website in the Safari app, which after logging in will then direct me to the creditor’s website to log in again. Is that step really necessary?! Even then, there are often no unchecked messages/ notifications/ or special offers, so I still don’t know what the problem is. this app is aware of such issues, but does nothing to correct these bugs. Currently this issue involves Spectrum and/or Time Warner Cable accounts that haven’t refreshed since September 2018.

Two other issues I have is that you can’t manually add a fixed APR loan account for banks without a website account login. Not all banks have this feature available to customers who do not have a checking account with them. The second issue is the option to post date or backdate when payments were made is not possible on Mint.

Ultimately, I’m disappointed with how much Mint has been going downhill over the last year. It was a good app before then, but it seems the developers have given up on regular updates for bug fixes. I’m just about ready to look for another app to replace it.

by Mhamaps

Prior to switching to this app at the start of 2019, I had been a Quicken user since 1987 and a QuickBooks user since 2009.

So far, I really like this app as it’s as seamless and easy to use as any software I’ve tried. I like the fact that once you set up your Accounts and Categories, it literally automates the entire process, and makes it relatively easy to modify a mid classified transaction. It’s an order of magnitude better than Quicken, as there’s really no need to worry about “balancing” translations from all of the accounts as this app seems to do that very well. What I’d like and is the reason I won’t give it a 5 Star rating is that there’s not a way to go back past the current month and add a Budget as the software is focused on keeping users in the now. That’s too bad, as it would be a cool and helpful feature if it were available. I also would like more flexibility to print our reports, but this app’s model prefers you do everything on line. Other than these few items, it’s a great product and I would be willing to opt in for a paid usage, especially if it would get me out of having to deal with all of the offers from credit cards through how to invest my money. Yet, those are small inconveniences considering the power of the program.

by Fernando In Colorado

I've been using this app for years and recently started using it consistently. There's a lot to love about this program! I won't go into all of its great features because with this kind of rating, it's obvious that there are many!
Instead, I want to bring up a few minor nits that keep this from being perfect for me. First, there's differences between what you can do on the web version, the iPad version and the iPhone version. For instance, you can only create new tags on the web version. The reports are slightly different. The way you set date ranges are different. It's not intuitively obvious how to do the same function on a different platform. I can manage it, but trying to help my not-quite-as-tech-savvy wife understand why the capabilities and functionality is different on each platform is hard.
The second nit is that across all the platforms, I don't see a way to do multiple filters. For instance, if I want to see all my fuel purchases at king soopers for the last two months, I have to either search for the fuel category and look manually (or export to csv) or by merchant and look manually or... But there's no way to specifically look for all three criteria.
Similarly, when I get a list of transactions in the little pop up window on the web version, there's no way to export just those transactions. I have to copy and paste them out to transfer to a spreadsheet.
Besides these nits, I love the program. I use it daily and am mostly very happy with it!

by Can't Stop Playing 8642356

Longtime this app user here. this app is the best app I’ve found for tracking spending and managing our budget. A HUGE improvement would be to create a feature in the budget tool that allows you to specify that transactions from certain vendors should ALWAYS fall under a certain category in the budget. It seems like this app eventually “learns” how to categorize some transactions, but it takes forever. Just give me a box to check that says “always categorize transactions from this vendor this way” or something. It gets wearisome having to individually recategorize transactions from the same vendor over and over. For the millionth time, NO, our favorite restaurant, Nose Dive, should not be categorized as “sporting goods” (who even had a sporting good line item in their budget?). And NO, purchases from Pet Supermarket should not be categorized as “groceries.” It would probably be helpful if you would also make it possible to delete budget categories we aren’t using. That might improve Mints ability to better guess where transactions should go.

Another helpful tool would be being able to select multiple transactions and then categorize the whole batch. Then I could select all of my entertainment, shopping, or restaurant transactions and categorize them in one fell swoop.

Come on, this app! You have a great product, but some of these things seem like common sense.

by Allnamestaken3

I really love this app a lot. There are a lot of really great features. I’ll highlight what is missing for me. 1) you can’t add a budget and assign money in prior months. For example, if I thought I had a one time spend in January that became a monthly spend later, I cannot go back to January to add a budget and assign money to it. Or, for example, I convinced my dad to start using this app and he started in April and I couldn’t go back and create budgets or categorize anything for January, February, or March :-( 2) Reporting leaves a lot to be desired. You can see your spend by category and month, but I prefer to know more detail. I keep a separate spreadsheet with my spend each month and then at the end of the year I can see the average spend in order to adjust my budget for the following year. this app would benefit greatly from better report options. (Dear Developer, please do not reply and tell me the reporting options I am seeking are there. They are not. I’ve tried everything IT has suggested and I cannot get the output I want. I would be happy to share my spreadsheet with you so you can see what I need.) 3) The website and app have different features and it’s frustrating that some things can ONLY be completed on the website. I really do love so many of the features it offers. It’s very close to perfect. And the fact it is free is HUGE for me!!!

by Kgrfree

This is the best budgeting app I’ve had. I’ve tried a few others and nothing compares. I like that I can link my accounts (recurring bills, investments, credit card, checking and saving), set personal budgeting goals, and watch where my money goes each week and month. Mint sends alerts to my email when I’ve exceeded a budget.

My issues however started a few weeks ago. For whatever reason, Mint has the hardest time syncing my checking and savings account, which I hold thru a small, local bank. I sometimes have to log out, log back in, and sync it a few times before it corrects itself. So my transactions aren’t loading, I’m not getting alerts, and the overall data isn’t correct. Mint used to sync on its own before May 2019 started. I’m not sure if it’s a new update that’s causing a glitch, but it sure is annoying. I check Mint to monitor my progress a few times a week, and I edit my budgets monthly, so it’s not like I hardly mess with Mint . Additionally, Mint doesn’t provided any tips or tricks for how to spend less/save more. Some apps I’ve tried had those but didn’t have the personalized budgets, so I switched to this one. Can’t have everything apparently.

Ultimately, I won’t ever leave Mint because it provides the bulk of what I’m looking for in Mint . I’m just annoyed that Mint stopped syncing my accounts without me forcing it to every few days.

by Stlmartins

I love this app to help me track my spending this is way better for me than the Bank of America tools because the bank site used different categories on different page sections, and I couldn’t create a cohesive easy to understand view. this app lets me pull in several accounts and credit cards and see everything all together. There are 2 things that bother me. First, it has a great feature for budgeting that allows you to carry over unused funds from month to month. This is great if you want to save up or reward yourself for behaving, but Mint can’t tell the difference between overspending and underspending. For example, if your clothing budget is $50 a month and you only spend $25 in one month, the extra $25 will carry over to give my $75 for next month (yay!) but Mint shows the budget item as red as if I have overspent and tells me I’m -$25 over budget (boo!). That makes NO sense and throws off my ability to quickly look for the red/yellow/green bars to see if I’m ok on spending and see how much I have available to spend. Also, I wish this app would “learn” better. There is one restaurant I frequent that always seems to get categorized as a hotel. I have changed the categorization about 200 times. I would like Mint to either figure it out or to let me set up an automatic override rule so I don’t have to keep changing the same charge over and over. If they would fix these 2 small things, Mint would be perfect for me.

by K8baby09

I love nearly everything about Mint. I love seeing all of my information displayed and the overall look and ease of Mint . However, I wish they would fix some of the issues they have with the banks and credit unions. When I first connected with them I had no issues then it duplicated most of my accounts. Now I have a few credit union accounts that show all savings, checkings and loans twice. When I asked for assistance with customer service to resolve they advised me to delete the account then reload (but they were not promising this would fix the issue) or just “hide” the duplicate accounts so I do not see them and Mint does not use the info. They also said if I deleted the account then I would lose all of my history it has collected. I opted to just hide my duplicate accounts since at that time I had several months of data I would lose and now I would have several years of data I would lose if I were to do it now. I am not satisfied by this and wish I did not have to have “hidden” accounts. Someday I hope they will have a fix where I do not lose all of my previous data Mint has collected to get this fixed. It is frustrating but I can live with it if I must. Besides that I have no complaints. They constantly update and add new features which I love. I do refer Mint to others.

by Donkey Breath$

I have been using Mint for several years now and I believe it's the best app for keeping track of bank accounts and credit cards. It has several new features that I am interested in using-investments . I really enjoy the fact that all I have to do is enter my password and I can see all the details of my checking account and my credit card. In my opinion this is the greatest app for controlling my budget. All I need now is a little will power. Thanks for Mint. I really miss the ability to make additional payments on my credit card. I wish I had used it more often. If you want to improve your credit score, use Mint to easily keep track of your money on a moment to moment basis. Having tried a few other apps, I am happy to say that Mint is the BEST. UPDATE!!! Oct 29, 2018: I have just experienced a second password failure. This same failure happened 2 years ago. (Nov 13,2016). Their system just drops the password and there's nothing you can do but establish a new password. It's the only complaint I have ever had with system. They send a message through your email so now I have to start all over again. Other than this problem, it's a great way of keeping track of your money.

by Hablo Espanol.

This is the only app I use for finances and it’s all I need! This has helped me to be on top of budgets, account balances, bills and my credit score. Mint would be great for anyone, even if you are starting out with you first savings account. It’s easy and can only be opened with your thumbprint or passcode if you wish. It sends you alerts if you have high spending or if your account balance gets to low. On the budgets you can use their categories and subcategories or create your own. I have only found a way to create them on the website, not on Mint but they may have updated since, not sure. Basically everything about Mint is customizable as for as organization goes. You can rename your accounts and when transactions come through under a category that may not make sense, you can change the category to fit in with where it goes in your budget. You can even hide transactions from your budgets and trends (there are trends a graphs for everything)!! I use this If say... I bought something for a friend who was going to pay me back with cash, but I didn’t want to take the cash back to the bank to balance the account. I could use this feature to just hide the transaction.

by Csnvette92

this app is the perfect tool to keep track of 100% of your finances. Want to track your net worth and credit for free this app is perfect. Saving goals, monthly budgets, pay bills, get reminded about bills. It's customizable and intuitive. It has gotten better over time. It used to be that you struggled to keep all your accounts synced, this app has improved the reliability. Of 20+ accounts, maybe one or two need to be fixed a year. Even your Lowe's card now syncs with this app. I only give it 4 stars because I wish I could pay to remove recommendations but that really isn't that annoying, it's less like a ad and more like an adviser showing you tools on how to save money. One thing I wish Mint could do that you can do on the web version is reset the monthly rollover budget for a category. Like if you went over on groceries last month and you need headroom this month, I have to go to the web version to reset the budget to zero without the overage carrying over from last month. Good job this app team! Can't wait to see how you integrate this app and turbo tax in the future.

One more request, add net worth to the trends within Mint , web version has it app does not. Important to ensure it always is going up!

by Widerwake

I’ve played with Mint for years. While I’ve always appreciated their more or less creating this concept and market, Mint never quite did it for me. Wow have they made some improvements — in layout, functionality, and especially the interface. I can’t think of another app that is changing for the better as quickly as this one. I’ve gone to make more than one suggestion and found it had already been added in the most recent update. Others *may* find the complex moving graphics of their financial Insights or the reward points for using Mint as it was intended a bit gimmicky, but I strongly disagree — it makes it more interesting, fun, and appealing to come back and check. If I could make one small suggestion that I’ll bet you’ve already addressed, it would be to make it a simple thing to turn *off* one by one “Large Expenses” flagged for review that happen every month (e.g., mortgage payment). Even better would just be to have Mint notice that and not email me about it. ;-) But really, this app feels like it’s under new leadership or something — it’s really changing in great ways and is worth checking out, even if it wasn’t your favorite before.

by Hyrulethemall

The latest update basically renders Mint unusable. To preface all of this, I have been a huge proponent of this service and have recommended it to countless friends and family members over the last three years. It has been profoundly helpful for me as a young adult learning how to budget, manage, and invest in ways that work for my income in a user-friendly and accessible way. With the latest update, though, those functions have been nullified or broken in such a way that they are unrecognizable.

Another reviewer stated that the developers have essentially rendered a clunkier version of our bank apps, which I fully agree with. I appreciate the attempts to “streamline” the product interface, but cramming everything onto one text-filled page is the opposite of intuitive. If users want a list of randomized expenses in an unreliable chronological order, they can easily find that with their personal banking app. The budgeting and visualization functions are unusable now, with many of the graphs being inaccurate or difficult to access.

Removing the tabs/pages took away the user’s ability to compartmentalize their spending habits, which has (for years) been the true benefit of this service. If there is not marked improvement within the next update to patch some of these issues noted in the *numerous* reviews below, this app has dug its own grave in abandoning longtime users and made it nearly impossible to attract new ones.

by Shaunajoelle

It would be nice to be able to add and edit categories when it comes to transactions. And have more options of linking “bill accounts” like Netflix and things - the selections there are limited. Also, I live with my parents and don’t pay the utilities companies directly, but I give [parents] money towards the rent, utilities, groceries, and insurance(s) every month. So I don’t have an account (like Electricity, gas, phone, water, cable, car/health insurance, etc) to link, because were all on family plans for every thing, but it would be nice if the payments I make to them would help my credit, cause it needs the help. I also don’t make rent payments to a company so those don’t count for me. I have all these bills to pay and none count towards my credit because I can’t link the account and I feel like that’s very unfair. I know I’m not the only person in this kind of situation, a LOT of people live with roommates (at the least - if not parents or grandparents or even siblings) and usually only one person has all the accounts in their name most of the time and the rest of the roommates give them money towards it all every month, I feel like it’s only fair for ALL the people to get credit score points towards all that for keeping up on payments, not just the account holder. Things are hard enough out there these days without being penalized for having roommates.

by MomsDoAccounting2

Mint and the desktop companion have helped me organize my household finances very effectively. Lately, however, I’ve had a couple issues. 1. No description of where I made a purchase is being downloaded into Mint from my bank. Everything used to come in clearly but now it just says the day it was made and the last 4 digits of the debit card used. It makes it hard to remember how to categorize because most are default categorized to restaurants. Weird. I’m running a household with 5 busy kids and I don’t always remember what was spent where. 2. There’s a glitch that sometimes erases all the categorization and notes I’ve made to transactions. So I have to go back and redo it all. It doesn’t happen a lot, and it’s not to every transaction, but it’s hard to recover when it does.
Other than this it works great and has helped me keep track of all the financial comings and goings of a busy household.

One suggestion would be to add a way to keep track of receipts. I’d love to scan in my receipts and track online receipts for tax purposes. All the apps online for this purpose are for small businesses, so they charge way too much and offer lots of features I won’t ever use. They just aren’t realistic for someone running a household.

by MarcosaurusRex

Update: All my bills in which I use mostly Mint for are all gone. Just disappeared. Not cool.

this app has worked wonders in managing my finances. No longer do I need registries, or keep up with my reciepts. If your a numbers geek, want to keep up your finances, or want to watch you banks grow. This is Mint to do it. I find myself looking at trends and budgets. Tweaking and adjusting to my financial goals and needs. With out Mint I would be truly clueless where all my money is going. Now I know where every penny goes. As a current college student recovering from credit card debt, watching my debts decrease and my net value increase has been addicting. Highly recommend. However I wish Mint allowed to add estimated payday payouts to the calendar on bills, giving you a balance of what you'd receive and what would be left after bills of the following 2 weeks and month. That way customers will know how much money they can budget everymonth. Or simply just adding the ability to add expected income before and adjusting automatically to when the deposit comes in. this app is great for tracking expenses, investments and property. Just not the best at income!