Gyroscopic Investing

I've been using Mint to track cash and credit card expenses for over a year now.  It's nice being able to monitor my credit cards for fraudulent charges, track spending in various categories, and pull up trend summaries of income & spending over time.

That is, until I started wondering why I was getting funky numbers in the trend summaries, like expenses for some months totalling less than my monthly mortgage & maintenance payments and astronomical expenses for other months.  So I started looking at some numbers and found an endless stream of obvious errors - and a lot of them, like several per month.  Such as:

- Incorrect figures for expenses that are recorded correctly elsewhere on the site
- Fictitious expenses for days when no expenses were recorded
- Obvious math errors like $0 income minus $5000 expenses = $5000 net income

I must say that this not only makes Mint less than useful for its basic purpose, but also doesn't exactly raise my confidence in their site's security.

Has anyone else noticed this?  Anyway if anyone has suggestions for alternate sites I would love to hear about them.  Otherwise I might just have to go back to the pencil & paper method.

Try personalcapital.com.

After using Quicken for more than a decade, I finally got fed up with the upgrade drill, the bloat, etc.  I tried Mint briefly but it really didn't work for me.

I switched to MoneyDance about three years ago and it mostly meets my needs.  The advantage for me - it has a Python interface so I can extract via Python the data that I need out of the program.

I think Excel - or pencil and paper - might just be a reasonable alternative.

Excel is pretty good for that sort of thing. I have a spreadsheet to keep track of net worth and the like.

You might like Billguard; depends on the functionality you are looking for.  https://www.billguard.com

... Mountaineer

WiseOne wrote: I've been using Mint to track cash and credit card expenses for over a year now.
... found an endless stream of obvious errors - and a lot of them, like several per month.  Such as:

- Incorrect figures for expenses that are recorded correctly elsewhere on the site
- Fictitious expenses for days when no expenses were recorded
- Obvious math errors like $0 income minus $5000 expenses = $5000 net income
...
Has anyone else noticed this?

I've been using Mint for a few years. I have noticed errors, but not fictitious expenses.
It's funny how badly I wanted them to allow cash transactions and the year they finally added that capability (typing them in yourself of course), I got lazy.
I spend a lot of time correcting slightly different company names so that they will all look the same when I do a search, but it's still less tedious than typing out everything myself.

Even though it makes me feel like a passive Big Brother, it's interesting to see where the wife had lunch before I even have a chance to ask her.

I think I mentioned this in another thread, but I highly recommend Mvelopes.  My wife and I've been using it for about 3 years, and we do all of our budgeting and manage all of our expenses through it. 

It requires you to actively assign your transactions to envelopes of your choosing, and it will not load transactions retroactively, so it may not be exactly what you're looking for.  But, in terms of managing household expenses to a pre-determined budget, I think it's one of the best options out there.

I wanted something that would require practically no overhead, by automatically pulling in and categorizing credit card and cash account (checking, savings) charges.  I inspect regularly for possibly fraudulent charges, review spending in different categories, and would like to get a monthly net income/expenses accounting that I can track.

Mint does a wonderful job with the first two functions, but fails miserably on the last one.  And the extent of the errors which they have clearly known about for a long time (I checked their bug report page) and chosen not to fix, makes me question their security.

I just wanted to know if anything else has come along that is an improvement over Mint with fewer bugs and a less clunky interface.  Surprisingly, the answer appears to be "no".  Personalcapital looks like a decent possibility but it's focused mainly on investment management.  Billguard also looks like a very useful app, but it doesn't do expense tracking (apparently), only monitors for potential fraudulent charges.  And neither service is free.

I guess I'll try a bug report in Mint...which will be ignored like all the others.

I love Mint.  But I agree it isn't perfect.

In my experience, the income & expense tracking with all of the credit cards and bank accounts has been pretty dependable.  Here are a few tips:

- You have to keep an eye on the categories, as they sometimes mix things up which causes problems with the trends tools.  Mainly things like a paycheck occasionally not registering as income until you correct it, or something being tagged as a category you've hidden from the trends.

- Credit card transactions do sometimes show up on a different day from when you made the purchase depending on when the card company and retailer closed the transaction, but I've never found that to be a problem. 

- If you ever get a new credit card number, the duplicate transactions it keeps from the old card takes a little while to manually sort out.

Importing data from my Fidelity and 401K accounts has always been a little spotty.  For example, it will often show the correct account total but import the individual transactions either incorrectly or not at all.  This will sometimes persist for a few months before it is fixed.  I can imagine the amount of constant work required to maintain proper communication with so many different financial databases is substantial.  Ultimately, whether Mint works for you may just come down to the specific accounts you're tracking and whether they communicate well with Mint.

WiseOne wrote: - Incorrect figures for expenses that are recorded correctly elsewhere on the site
- Fictitious expenses for days when no expenses were recorded
- Obvious math errors like $0 income minus $5000 expenses = $5000 net income

I believe it's open source software so this isn't surprising but I've seen the same kind of thing in the Fidelity tools and I've even reported it to them. You'd think they would be interesting in correcting the errors and I was even willing to help them but what I got from the person I was talking to was like "We're really sorry for your frustration" like the whole problem was my frustration and not their error.

Fixing bugs in software isn't always as easy as it sounds--even longstanding ones. Engineering resources aren't infinite and some issues have significant architectural or infrastructural complications that are invisible to the users.

I mean, it took Microsoft, what, 25 years to implement copy and paste via keyboard shortcuts in their terminal program, and they're Microsoft. Then again, they're Microsoft.

WiseOne wrote:
Billguard also looks like a very useful app, but it doesn't do expense tracking (apparently), only monitors for potential fraudulent charges.  And neither service is free.

WiseOne,

This is some additional info about Billguard.  The iPhone App is more functional than the desktop version.  The App does show some rudimentary tracking for the credit cards and bank accounts that you include (I think you get a few "cards" free, then additional ones cost if I remember correctly).  The App main screen has 5 sections - the top one shows the cards you have included plus a summary that all show via sliding the section left and right.  The other four sections are "inbox" that shows transactions that you have not marked as OK, "all" which shows all transactions, "analytics" which is a line graph for the month that shows current month vs. previous month expenses - you can slide to see previous months, and a "savings" section that seems to be not of much value to me.  The App automatically updates daily as it monitors for new expenses; you have to manually accept or mark for followup each transaction.  You can also add the "cards" to the Apple Passbook App if you wish (limited value for me).  If you have an iPhone it might be worth playing with the App .... I forget if there is an Android App.  I use both the Mint App and the Billguard App on my iPhone.  I also have Billguard and Mint on my laptop but I rearely use them.  Together, the iPhone Apps do almost everything I need or want.  They both can use the "Touch ID" password system that the newer iPhones use - very convenient and secure - and together, the Apps make daily monitoring of transactions very easy and it takes me very little time - maybe a couple of minutes per day.

I do keep a spreadsheet of my own design to keep track of finances long term, as well as custom spreadsheets for all sorts of other medical, household, books read, equipment maintenance, etc., record keeping.  Anyway, good luck with whatever you end up with. 

... Mountaineer

I used to use Mint, but then due to security concerns I switched over to using YNAB.  A little bit more work to import transactions, but very nice reporting, and the concepts they use are very useful.

WiseOne wrote: I just wanted to know if anything else has come along that is an improvement over Mint with fewer bugs and a less clunky interface.  Surprisingly, the answer appears to be "no".  Personalcapital looks like a decent possibility but it's focused mainly on investment management. 

In your original post you said, "It's nice being able to monitor my credit cards for fraudulent charges, track spending in various categories, and pull up trend summaries of income & spending over time."

Personal Capital does all of this in a nearly identical fashion to Mint.  It does an excellent job at automatically categorizing my expenses including all of the pretty (probably prettier) bar and pie charts. It may be slightly more investment-centric than Mint, but if anything that just makes it better than Mint at investments and equal to Mint in tracking spending. I use both interchangeably (with 20+ connected accounts), and only prefer Mint at the moment because it connects a bit more seamlessly to my main brokerage account with Interactive Brokers.

Give it a shot before dismissing it completely. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

iwealth wrote: Personal Capital ...
Give it a shot before dismissing it completely. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

And just say "No thank you" to the friendly customer rep who will call you after a couple weeks...
Can't blame them for trying though.

Pointedstick wrote: Fixing bugs in software isn't always as easy as it sounds--even longstanding ones. Engineering resources aren't infinite and some issues have significant architectural or infrastructural complications that are invisible to the users.

Finding and fixing bugs in software is something I'm very good at. It's a simple logical process to me. While everybody is standing around and attributing it to magical and mysterious demons any body who has written a lot of code knows there is always a logical reason for everything the computer does and you just have to nail it down systematically.

Sometimes I wonder if my talents wouldn't have been better spent finding a cure for cancer but alas I've wasted a lot of time on these kinds of trivial pursuits.

pp4me3 wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: Fixing bugs in software isn't always as easy as it sounds--even longstanding ones. Engineering resources aren't infinite and some issues have significant architectural or infrastructural complications that are invisible to the users.

Finding and fixing bugs in software is something I'm very good at. It's a simple logical process to me. While everybody is standing around and attributing it to magical and mysterious demons any body who has written a lot of code knows there is always a logical reason for everything the computer does and you just have to nail it down systematically.

Sure. It is in fact my vocation as well. I was just pointing out that there are always more bugs than time and resources to squash them all. That's why all software is full of bugs!

WiseOne wrote:I just wanted to know if anything else has come along that is an improvement over Mint with fewer bugs and a less clunky interface.  Surprisingly, the answer appears to be "no".

Not so.

[url=http://"http://www.moneydesktop.com/culture/releases/2012/09/19/moneydesktop-wins-second-consecutive-best-of-show/"]MoneyDesktop[/url] Best Interface, and best automatic transaction categorization psuedo-intelligence.  But you have to have at least one account at an institution that uses MoneyDesktop (many credit unions and small banks do).

[url=http://"https://yodleemoneycenter.com/apps/mfaregistration.retailpv.do?_flowId=mfaregistration&c=csit_key_0%3AEXMqtAWQVEaAJ1VrmP4NLwgdQbU%3D&l=_flowId:u:s"]Yodlee[/url] The ancient (since 1999!), venerable, reliable, and excellent Yodlee.  Like MoneyDesktop, its bread and butter is as a back-end, but unlike MoneyDesktop, one can also sign up as an unattached individual.  Yodlee used to be Mint's backend, before Mint was bought by Intuit.

[url=http://"https://moven.com/"]Moven[/url] One app to rule them all. Link your existing accounts and hypercharge all your transactions with Moven.

[url=http://"https://www.moneystream.com/"]MoneyStream[/url] A little-known alternative.  I don't really know anything about it.

There are actually a lot of little-known alternatives.  The first three I list above are good.

Oh yeah, and:

[url=http://"https://check.me/"]Check[/url]  Formerly PageOnce, another of the Original Gangstas of the account-aggregation world.

Thanks LC!  Some nice options there.

Nothing's perfect though.  I figure that until something really five star comes up, I'll stick with Mint and use another method to get my monthly income/expense figures (hint:  can do it from the budget page).  Since Mint uses yodlee as its back end, though, I'm less worried about security - and better not to go foraging around setting up new accounts if I don't have to!

WiseOne wrote:Since Mint uses yodlee as its back end, though, I'm less worried about security

I do not believe that this is the case.  After being bought by Intuit, they changed over to a different (presumably Intuit-developed) back-end.

Check was also bought by Intuit, but I believe they have continued using the back-end they have always used, which they developed independently.