Which personal finance app will step up to fill the void?
By John H. Robinson, Financial Planner (April 2024)
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 is a big captive audience turn away. However, a reading between 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 (see image below).
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 sales giant Empower acquired Personal Capital in 2020. On the heels of Inuit’s announcement, 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 of suitors, 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 devoid of irritating advertising solicitations, and does not use consumers’ financial data as a profit center. That application is eMoney, and the reason it flies under the personal finance radar is that eMoney is only available through white-labeled enterprise level subscriptions to insurance companies, banks, and investment firms and through professional 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 is/was head and shoulders above Mint in terms of functionality as a financial planning platform. In fairness, Mint’s spending/budgeting application may have been a little bit more user-friendly than eMoney’s.
However, Mint had two major shortcomings. First, Mint never included a cloud-based document storage service. Maintaining beneficiary designations, estate planning documents, tax returns, insurance coverages, employee benefits, etc. is critical component of any comprehensive financial planning platform. eMoney has it, and it is arguably the most important/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, when I subscribed to Mint, I found the constant flow of unsolicited disastrously bad financial advice more than a little irritating. In contrast, eMoney’s only source of revenue is the subscription revenue from institutional subscribers and professional subscriptions from thousands of independent wealth managers and financial planners. With eMoney, 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 decision to pivot away from the independent financial advisor market space.
For the uninitiated, Nest Egg Guru is the maker of two interactive, web-based, retirement saving and spending simulation apps. I co-founded the company in 2015 and took it through the Blue Startups Accelerator program. However, a problem with Nest Egg Guru’s original business model is that the total potential market consists of just around 200,000 independent financial advisors. Further, there are already nearly a hundred apps competing for advisor subscription dollars, and the the SaaS landscape in this space is littered with emaciated companies that will likely never scale to profitability.
Rather than continue down that path, my Nest Egg Guru co-founders and I have decided to pivot to the vastly larger and now vastly under-served consumer finance space. Specifically, we are making Nest Egg Gurus simulation apps available for free on a new personal finance website called Nest Egg Guru PF. In addition to offering access to Nest Egg Guru’s unique app suite, Nest Egg Guru PF will also offer consumers free access to eMoney and the engaging blog comment from my other two financial planning businesses Financial Planning Hawaii, and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii.
In surveying the personal finance landscape, I have noticed that there are surprisingly few great personal finance sites. There are plenty of personal finance bloggers and “finfluencers” of varying credibility and experience, but almost none that include the software consumers need to centralize, organize, monitor, and maintain their entire financial lives. By providing all of the aforereferenced services and content in a single personal finance site, we are not introducing Nest Egg Guru PF as Mint 2.0 because we believe it will be so much better than that.
So It’s All Free?… What’s the Catch?
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 PF consumer website, we will drive organic traffic to Nest Egg Guru’s two sibling websites which will further boost our search ranking. Both financial planning companies are already among the most visible brands in the Hawaii financial planning space. We hope the launch of Nest Egg Guru PF will help us further establish thought leadership recognition in Hawaii and nationally.
Beyond that, Nest Egg Guru’s co-founders 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 in ways that will not involve selling out our users or compromising our own business ethics.
At a certain user-level, we will probably need introduce some sort of a paid subscription model similar to what Intuit does with Turbo Tax or what it did with the ad-free smart phone version of Mint. The subscription revenue will be needed to allow us to hire support staff to help with enrollment/onboarding and offer chat/email support. For now, our intention is to make Nest Egg Guru PF “free forever” to at least the first 500 consumers who sign up to use eMoney.
I want to make clear to skeptical readers that the launch of Nest Egg Guru PF is NOT a thinly veiled lead-generation ploy for Financial Planning Hawaii or Fee-Only Planning Hawaii (the way Personal Capital was a lead-generation tool for its founding portfolio management firm). While all Nest Egg Guru PF website visitors who enroll in eMoney will automatically be subscribed to receive the Financial Planning Insights e-newsletter that provides the latest blog content for all three companies, no one from Financial Planning Hawaii or Fee-Only Planning Hawaii will ever directly or indirectly solicit Nest Egg Guru PF site users and you are welcome to unsubscribe from Financial Planning Insights any time.
Nest Egg Guru PF is slated to launch in mid-June 2024 at NestEggPF.com and NestEggGuruPF.com
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)
John H. Robinson is the owner/founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. He is also a co-founder of fintech software maker Nest Egg Guru.
