Intuit is Pitching Credi Karma to Replace Mint. It is Apples to Oranges.
By John H. Robinson, Financial Planner, June 2024
In November 2023, fintech juggernaut Intuit (NASDAQ – INTU) shocked the personal finance community when it announced plans to shut down its popular consumer finance site/app Mint.com, and directed users to migrate to Credit Karma, the credit monitoring platform Intuit acquired for $7 billion in 2020. Speculation abounds over the reason for Intuit’s decision. Some online pundits noted that Mint’s user base had been steadily declining over the past few years. Others pointed out that Mint and Credit Karma shared overlapping and competing advertiser-driven revenue models, and that shutting down Mint was necessary to help recoup the acquisition cost of Credit Karma. Whatever the reason(s), much to the chagrin of its estimated 3.6 million users, the MInt was shut down at the end of April (2024), and disenfranchised Mint users were pitched Credit Karma as a replacement.
Mint vs. eMoney
Over the years, I often described Mint as the consumer-direct counterpart to eMoney, the popular financial planning software many financial advisors provide to their clients. More specifically, I snarkily referred to eMoney as the “grown-up” version of Mint because Mint used its subscribers’ financial data to help advertisers target them with an endless barrage of “recommendations” from credit card issuers, insurance companies, brokerage firms, crypto-traders, etc. In contrast, because eMoney’s revenue is derived solely from pricey advisor subscriptions, client data remains private eMoney and users are thus free from irritating ads and solicitations.
Aside from the different revenue models, both applications offered a clean, intuitive user experience and allowed users to link accounts at multiple institutions (banks, credit unions, investment firms, insurance companies, credit cards, etc.). Mint and eMoney also enabled users to obtain a centralized, organized view of their holdings and helped users create budgets and track savings and spending over time. The primary differences in functionality were that Mint placed a greater emphasis on budgeting and provided users with their credit scores while eMoney focuses more on portfolio management and financial planning.
However, there are two features that set eMoney apart from Mint – and all other personal finance software. One is the reporting functionality. The Reports section of eMoney allows users one-click access to a host of useful, well-designed reports including personal balance sheets, net worth statements, broad and detailed asset allocations, holdings details, insurance summaries, off-balance sheet items, and many more.
The second distinguishing feature is the eMoney Vault. eMoney is one of the very few personal finance apps to include a free document storage vault. In it, users can create an unlimited number of subfolders to organize and store important financial planning documents, such as beneficiary designations, estate planning documents, employee benefits handbooks, real estate ownership documents, tax returns, etc.
Is Credit Karma the New Mint?
When I first learned of Intuit’s intention to migrate Mint users to the Credit Karma platform, I assumed that most of Mint’s functionality would be retained and that it would be enhanced by the addition of Credit Karma’s credit card monitoring capabilities. However, that does not appear to be the case. In fact, the budgeting capability, which was Mint’s most lauded feature, has disappeared. Credit Karma does still allow users to link accounts at multiple financial institutions, but aside from enabling users to track their (liquid) net worth, it does not appear to offer any portfolio management reporting tools (e.g. asset allocation, holdings details, etc.) nor does it appear to allow the inclusion of real assets (e.g., real estate, collectibles, etc.).
Beyond the basic account aggregation capabilities, there appears to be surprisingly little overlap between eMoney and Credit Karma. If anything, the two applications seem to be almost complementary. eMoney remains a quintessential financial planning platform, while Credit Karma provides credit reporting and credit card monitoring functionality that eMoney lacks.
Advice and Alternatives for Consumers
To the extent that consumers don’t mind having their financial data used to drive advertising solicitations, I am okay with recommending Credit Karma. In my opinion, Credit Karma serves a valuable role as a free provider of some of the services that are offered for sale by the three major credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax, and Trans Union). As a credit card management tool, I believe Credit Karma also has some nominal user experience advantages over competing credit monitoring apps such as Wallet Hub, Credit Wise, and Nerd Wallet.
However, I do not think much of Credit Karma as an apples-to-apples replacement for Mint, and I am far from alone in this opinion. A cursory review of consumer commentary in online forums such as Reddit, finds that former Mint users seem profoundly disappointed with Credit Karma. Their disaffection is compounded by the fact that there are not many comparable alternatives to Mint in the DIY/consumer-direct personal finance app space. The next closest platform, Personal Capital, which also bore a significant resemblance to eMoney, was acquired by insurance company, Empower, a few years ago. Microsoft recently shuttered its MS Money personal finance platform as well.
These days many banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and investment firms offer their customers free account aggregation services similar to what Mint provided to make the customer relationships stickier and mine their financial data for cross-selling opportunities. Indeed, some pundits have suggested that the proliferation of these services was a major factor in the erosion in the number of Mint users over the past decade.
eMoney to the Rescue?… Stay Tuned!
For its part, eMoney would seem to be an ideal alternative to fill the void left by Mint. eMoney is already being used by more than 6 million consumers. However, most DIY consumers have never heard of eMoney because the app is only available through financial advisors.
To help solve this dilemma, I am developing a new personal finance website that will include free consumer access to eMoney by piggybacking on Financial Planning Hawaii’s existing professional subscription. The site will also include access to Nest Egg Guru’s unique retirement savings and spending simulation apps along with the personal finance blog content I produce for Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. The site will be called Nest Egg Guru PF and the URL will be NestEggPF.com.
I anticipate this rollout may initially be met with skepticism from consumers who may perceive the venture as a ploy to attract and solicit business for FPH and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. That will not be the case. Both companies have all the business they can handle, and neither is equipped to scale. Visitors to the Nest Egg Guru PF website who sign up for access to eMoney will not be solicited by my financial planning companies nor will we sell their data to advertisers. I intend to launch this new personal financial planning website as a truly free resource for consumers.
My motivation for launching Nest Egg Guru PF is to enhance the brand recognition and search ranking of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. This will be done by linking the article titles on the Nest Egg Guru PF website to the corresponding articles on the FPH and FOPH blogs. The more traffic is driven to the content on my financial planning websites, the more search engines will recognize the sites’ credibility and the higher they will rank them when consumers search for services related to what we do.
Nest Egg Guru PF is expected to launch in mid-June. Readers of this article who wish sign-up for eMoney are welcome to enroll early by sending an email to info@fphawaii.com. Please put “eMoney “in the subject line, and include your first, name, last name, and preferred email address. We will send a login invitation as soon as the site goes live.
John H. Robinson is the owner/founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii, and he is a co-founder of software maker Nest Egg Guru.
