Which personal finance app will step up to fill the void?
By John H. Robinson, Financial Planner
In a November 2023 press release that surprised and disappointed legions of loyal users, fintech software juggernaut Intuit (owner of Quickbooks, Turbo Tax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma) announced that it is shuttering its popular personal finance app, Mint.com. Mint was a pioneer in the DIY budgeting and account aggregation space. Since its introduction in 2007, Mint consistently won praise for its outstanding user experience.
Why Would Intuit Shut Down and App with Millions of Loyal Users?
Although accurate data on Mint’s active users is difficult to ascertain, many media outlets place the figure in the 3-4 million users. That’s a big captive audience turn away. However, a little reading behind the lines suggests that the seeds for Mint’s demise were sewn with Intuit’s 2020 $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma. Since both Mint and Credit Karma generated revenue from advertisements and paid referrals to financial services companies, it made little sense for Mint to compete for and even cannibalize Credit Karma’s revenue sources. Other sources note that Mint’s user base had been in a downward spiral for years as banks, credit card companies, and investment firms all rolled out similar free budgeting and account aggregation tools to create stickier relationships with customers.
For its part, Intuit is spinning Mint’s demise not as a shuttering, but has an integration upgrade with Mint users being courted to migrate to Credit Karma.
Mint officially closed shop on March 31, so not all the votes have been counted as to whether or not the migration was an upgrade. However, if the following posts to personal finance/Mint-related Reddit sub-groups may be considered an early indicator, CK is not being received favorably:
New Credit Karma Instead of Mint SUCKS.
Just a warning to for those moving to Credit Karma
As one Redditer commented,
“Not sure what I expect from posting here, but I am just so bummed by credit karma. It’s literally just a platform to sell you ads, credit cards, checking, etc.”
The Void in the Personal Finance Software Space
Although Mint was the largest player in the personal finance software space, there was already a void created when Microsoft shut down its popular Microsoft Money Excel app in 2023 and when insurance and annuity giant Empower acquired Personal Capital in 2020. There are scores of articles suggesting alternatives for disenfranchised Minters. Free, advertising/lead-driven apps such as Nerd Wallet and Rocket Money appear frequently on this list, as do paid apps including Monarch Money, YNAB, and even Intuit’s own Simplifi budgeting app.
Interestingly, there is one personal finance app that, according to its website, has more than 6 million users, is available for free, is entirely free of irritating advertising solicitations, and does not use consumers’ financial data as a profit center. The name of that application is eMoney, and the reason why it flies under the radar is that eMoney is only available through white-labeled enterprise level subscriptions to insurance companies, banks, and investment firms and through individual subscriptions to independent financial advisors.
As an early adopter of Mint.com and a long-time subscriber to eMoney through Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii, I often referred to Mint as the eMoney of the DIY personal finance space. In comparing the two, eMoney really was head and shoulders above Mint as a financial planning platform. In fairness, Mint’s spending/budgeting application was definitely better and more user friendly than eMoney’s. However, Mint had two major shortcomings. First, Mint never included cloud-based document storage. Maintaining beneficiary designations, estate planning documents, tax returns, insurance coverages, employee benefits, etc. is critical competent of any comprehensive financial planning platform. eMoney has it, and it is arguably the most valuable element of the platform.
Second, Mint’s revenue model (and now Credit Karma’s) runs directly contrary to the interests of its users. While I have no doubt that many Mint users learned to tune out the constant invitations to trade their brains out and/or to sign up for crypto or options trading scams, I found the constant flow of unsolicited disastrously bad financial advice to more than a little irritating. In contrast, eMoney’s only source of revenue is the subscription revenue from white-labeled institutional subscriptions from thousands of independent wealth managers and financial planners. The end users – consumers – are freed from all the marketing nonsense. As I have been wont to say, “eMoney is the grown-ups version of Mint.”
Nest Egg Guru Pivoting to Become Mint2.0?
The dichotomy with eMoney of course is that it is not available to individual consumers and many (perhaps most) former Mint users are DIY investors who have zero interest in working with a financial advisor. Call it serendipity, but Mint’s inglorious exit from the personal fintech space comes on the heels of Nest Egg Guru’s pivot away from the independent financial advisor space. With a total market size of just around 200,000 independent financial advisors and nearly a hundred apps competing for advisor subscription dollars, the SaaS landscape is littered with emaciated companies that will likely never scale to profitability.
Rather than continue to down that path, my Nest Egg Guru co-founders and I have decided to pivot instead to the vastly larger and now under-served consumer finance space. Specifically, we are converting Nest Egg Guru to a personal finance website that will include free access to our unique, proprietary retirement savings and spending simulation apps. More relevantly, Nest Egg Guru has always had a symbiotic relationship with Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii, Nest Egg Guru will also be offering free consumer access to eMoney.
Astute readers, will likely ask, “What is Nest Egg Guru’s profit motive?” The near term answer is that by sharing links to Financial Planning Hawaii’s and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii’s popular blog content on the Nest Egg Guru consumer website, we will drive organic traffic to our two sibling website which will further boost our search ranking. Both companies are already among the most visible brands in the Hawaii financial planning space.
Beyond that, my Nest Egg Guru co-founders and I are taking a “Build it and they will come” approach. If we can attract a few hundred thousand disenchanted Mint users by offering a superior free solution, I am sure we will be able to find ways to monetize the site that will not involve selling out our users or compromising our own business ethics.
Related Reading:
Mint, One of the First Budgeting Apps, is Shutting Down (NY TImes, 11/3/2023)
Intuit kills Mint, and personal finance app users are unhappy. (ZDNET)
I tested the best Mint alternatives, and this is my new preferred money app (ZDNET)
Mint is gone — here are some alternative budget apps to consider (CNBC)