#213 – Navigating the Mint.com Budgeting Platform Shutdown: Your Guide to What Comes Next

Welcome back to the Money Boss Parent podcast Anna is here, and I'm excited to chat with you today about a transition that is taking place right now in the space of budgeting world. And one of my favorite apps of all times is shutting down at the end of this year. So on December 31 mint.com, is going away. Or rather, it's being transitioned to another platform. And some of the features that myself and clients that I worked with, over the years come to love are going away. So in this series, I want to explore what it looks like for you to transition out of mint if you using that platform. And what are some of the steps you need to take to gather your data, understand what would be available for you if you decide to stay mint.com has been transitioned to its sister company called Credit Karma. Credit Karma is known for providing consumers information and reports on their credit history and like credit reports. So they're going to combine together this budgeting slash expense tracking app with with all of that. So understanding what it's going to take for you to go there and and as well as what are some of the other options. And honestly, I'm excited for this conversation, because I probably myself have not really explored anything outside of men for the last like 12 years. So I've been a user of it for that long. So you get to hear me talk about how I have utilized it. And what I'm going to do. So tune in, we're going to have a really fun conversation, take some notes. And hopefully this is kind of like one of those conversations where like, all right, maybe what I currently have or how I currently monitor and keep track of my spending, not necessarily just budgeting could be done better. All right. Okay, my friends, let's get into it. Well, I think there's good news, I think there might not be so great news. But I want to talk to you today about the whole thing that's happening with mint. It's, it's rather interesting, because I think in our industry, as technology has allowed us advisors and and you consumers and us as well, right? Because we're not just advisors to have all kinds of tools at our fingertips, like at the top of our fingerprints. But this transition of mint platform is rather interesting, because they've been around for a while. They're like one of the pioneers in this space. So it's interesting, because then now we get to sort of figure out what's next because I was thinking about it over the weekend. It's been like over a decade that I personally have really looked and at a new budgeting tools, and like really, you know, explored what's available. So I'm excited to share with you what we're all planning to do here. So here's how I was going to be talking to you today. My name is Tanisha goneana. For those of you who don't know me, have Jennifer here, too. I don't know if you can see her just yet. Or maybe when she just speaks. And Catherine is joining us here as well, in just a few minutes. We all have the different experiences with budgeting apps, and so on platforms. That's why I thought it would be great if you heard from all of us across the board in today's presentation. So I want to talk a little bit about what the transition is going to look like. Or at least from what we can see from mint to Credit Karma. And also like if you're going to use credit commerce platform, what are some of the things to know there? How are we going to capture mins data? So if you're like me, I have data going back to 2011. That's a lot of data. And as I started to look at that, like a few questions came up. So I want to share, you know what those are with you. And of course, as I mentioned, we're going to be looking at what are the alternatives for you going forward. So a couple of things that are happening with men's transition. Now we do know that they publicly publicly announced that the app is shutting down at the end of the year. Whether you like it or not, or whether you're going to do something about it, it's happening. So I wanted to personally be more proactive because I feel like if that goes away and I haven't done anything it's like don't have anything to you know rely on for all of that budgeting and spending data. So they are taking all of your information and they're moving into to Credit Karma now Credit Karma is widely known for their features of monitoring your credit reports and I've looked into I don't have accounts at Credit Karma. Maybe Jennifer or Catherine if you do you guys can chime in on that in a bit too. Well, what they're doing is they're adding some of the main features not everything is stay paying into their huge credit monitoring credit report platform. So if you already have Credit Karma account, I think you once the whole migration happens, you will have all of it in one place. But because Credit Karma is not mint.com, or they're not built in the way that that platform was built, they're gonna have limited features of what's coming over from mint. So one that's interesting that's going to completely migrate is your net worth history. So if you've been tracking your net worth, like your financial accounts, you're like home values, just anything, right? What goes on your financial statements, that that is going to come over. They're also bringing over up to three years of your spending transactions. So when I looked at my data, that meant had, I have data going back years and years. And so only three years of that is going to come over. So we need to figure out how we how do we get that data? And if you really want it, what can you do with it, they're there, I have not seen the platform because they have not released it, all they did is they announced that Mint is going away. So we're sort of are still in this waiting pattern. And the best thing you can do is kind of watch your inbox and see if they send you a notification, right, because that's what they did. They send everybody an email saying, We're sending you down, it's like two months warning. But if you do decide to stay with them and kind of test them out, I just want you to know some of the things that are going to be available, there is going to be a section under the credit card umbrella that's going to have the budgeting features, there's going to be like category breakdown, they're gonna give you the average of the categories, like the category categories could be groceries or like eating out or restaurants or you know, coffee, for example. And then they'll give you average, based on how much data you bring. Or if you decide not to bring the last three years or all together, then it's not going to be available. And then also month to month comparison of your expenses and income. So it's rather limited, because those of you who do use mint, that gets to be really detailed, like you can do subcategories, and especially if you have lots of data there. It may not give you enough information. So that's kind of where I'm sitting with that so far, but I kind of want to see it first, to make a final decision. Again, there's no specific date, when this transition will happen. I'm hoping that you're going to like let us know, maybe hopefully next week or after the holidays, to figure out so we can start to figure out what options do we have there. And one thing to note is that so be kind of careful, as you look through the emails, what they're asking you to do. I dug up this somewhere in there like FAQs, page, but once you sort of accept this, like I'm going to Credit Karma you like the whole process starts and your data starts to migrate, you can't really use mint anymore, it's gonna go away at the end of the year anyway, but it's just like in case you were like, Oh, I just got to do a few more things here. It's just not gonna be available to you. So before I can make any more determination, whether this platform is something I personally want to use, or even recommend to clients, maybe sort of take like the safer approach, like take a look of what's there. And if it's sufficient enough, if you're really are, if you really use men for the last however many years is just to be something like either on your phone, which I have an app on my phone, or it's like once in a while you log in and it kind of like aggregates all your data, and you get an idea of what your spending is. Maybe what Credit Karma offers is going to be sufficient enough. But if you want more robust, more detailed breakdown of all the spending, which I think in our experience, as advisors, not very many people really do. That might be something that is sufficient enough, I have read that mint. Transition to Credit Karma is still like the whole offering for the budgeting features thing free. Because one of the things that people are really upset about is that mint used to be a they never charged money, their their platform was to throw ads in front of you, right? Because that's how they made their money on the back end. And so there isn't really any three options that we prefer out there. So maybe this is kind of like that interim transition. But I'm excited to talk to you about what we're actually looking at here

for other options, so this is just a few pictures that I screenshots that I took of what Credit Karma budget view will be and again, this is like on your cell phone. So depending on what you use, whether it's a desktop or or mobile device, but again, if you just Just want to kind of have like a, you know, big picture snapshot of what's going on. You can see these are the categories kind of like I was mentioning, it does give you, you know, an idea of what's going on. So but no, no further information about that at this point. So let's talk about weather. What are you going to do with this data? What are you going to move to Credit Karma? Or are you going to go somewhere else. So this is I found it to be useful. This is some screenshots I took from from my account, I found this to be useful if you log in, in the browser into your mint app, or program. And one of the things that is rather, extra steps to go through is if you have a lot of history. And so what I was sharing earlier is one of the things that I'm contemplating is whether I can kind of highlight for you, I have almost 19,000 transactions that are stored with in this account, right, going back this many years. So one of the things I started to think about, Do I really, yes, I can download the data. But do I really need all of that going back more than a decade, like, what are you going to do with this data? Because, and depending where you're going to go, right, it might actually help you so so that's one thing to note. So when you log into your mint account, you're going to click on transactions, and you're going to go all the way down. So use this, you know, navigation bar or little arrows right to go to the very last page of your transactions. And that's where you can kind of get a sense of how many transactions are there. So mint allows you to download 10, up to 10,000 transactions at a time. So like, if you click download, you click on you know, you click on this export button, and it's going to cut it off. Once it hits 10,000 transactions, you can also filter so look at the date, and you're gonna get just like a CSV file, look at the date where it cuts it off. And if you want to get the rest, like in my case, I had to do two downloads, because it was cutting it off. In 2018 actually have data going back to 2006. So I had to do another dollar. So you just filter and put a date in. So it's really easy, you're gonna get this spreadsheet that you can, you know, later on, decide what you want to do. If you decided if you've got your data, and you're deciding, you know, whichever direction you're gonna go, I would probably work on I'm going to do this kind of like towards the end of December, just to make sure that everything is is working, but deleting your data, I'm gonna, I'll share this presentation with everyone watching here, because I included some links to where you can actually go and get further, you know, steps and instructions. There's actually a few videos too, that I'm going to show today in the presentation. But it's going to be helpful as you kind of working through this. But if you want to delete your data, and that's really one thing that I was kind of wondering, like what happens, you know, you can download your data, but you know, that still exists in their, on their servers. So you can request to delete your data, it takes about 15 days for them to process because maybe you changed your mind or maybe you were opened up the download file and you realize things like something was missing. So you have kind of like that almost two weeks window to let them know that you changed your mind and whatnot. So that's like the first step. I think I would like to take in the second step it would be like completely, you know, closing your account. And before you know before everything is said and done. So it's sort of a sort of like a two step cautionary process for you to get rid of work close the mint account. I'm gonna pause here for a second, Jennifer, I don't know if there was any comments or questions or anything came through? I don't see any q&a. I don't see any chat. Nope, we're good. Okay, good. Um, so that's, that's kind of it on on mend, in terms of like, what, you know, how we would close that chapter of, you know, budgeting. So let's look, I know we're gonna touch on it some more, let's look at some of the other budgeting apps and how you know they compared to men's. So hopefully that will help you make a decision. Where do you go and you know, how do you actually make that decision? I was so excited when I found this. This was on a Wall Street Journal, I'll find the actual article, but it was so excited to find some data of how people actually truck. The article was about tracking expenses, spending right in income, but I really never had like the statistic because one of the things that we all hear as advisors from our clients is like, we're like we're so bad with tracking your expenses or like I looked at my spending plan or like, if we if you come back to see us once a year they're like okay, well this is a time I do it and like it always sort of is that conversation but it anyway. So let me highlight for you what is really happening. This is the reality of what the whole budgeting world looks like. Just about sick little over 60% of people who actually pay attention to their finances and track their expenses, use online bank statements to track their data. I mean, we all download our statements, right? We'll get them in the email. So I kind of question that, right. Some of us get statements in the mail. So that's about like 28 or so percent. Then about 25%. Use spreadsheets, right? So you could say like, if your main street client, we also use our spending plan to hopefully help you track expenses I'm getting, I'm getting to a point here. A bank budgeting tool, you probably have seen that over like the last few years, banks starting to offer, you know, ways for you to keep track of your expenses and all of that I have not explored it. But I've seen in you know, various banks, I have a few that, you know, you can kind of do that. Now, this is where we're lending here, these third party budgeting apps. So mint falls under that category we're going to talk about you need a budget, we're gonna talk about tiller. So as you can see, it's like a very small percentage of people not under like, under 10% actually use those apps. So anyway, because I was I was stressing out for a bit once. I heard that man was going to him like oh my god, the world is ending. But the reality is rather different. So wherever you fall into on the spectrum is okay. As long as you really know what you're spending money on, I think I want to end on that positive note