Why Mint.com + Intuit is a Big Idea

Never heard of Mint until Intuit bought them. I have since opened an account and am enjoying their product. I have run into a couple of account recognition issues but overall I am happy.

Working in the financial arena I have had many a gripe about Intuit and the constant updating, as well as the “feature” rich programming which can create confusion galore. I really hope Mint is able to retain their identity.

However, I think the majority of the gripes on this list are coming from people who have their eye on high quality and “free”. Good luck. You live an illusion. This, “it should be free” attitude is a perfect example of how obnoxious the average consumer has become regarding value.

Intuit has poor customer service, hopefully that will change, but I will take Mint with the power of Intuit behind it over changing for the next best thing that is free on the web.

I’ve been using Mint.com for a few months now and I love it. I’ve been telling all my friends about it and I love the iPhone application equally as much. I just hope that it remains free now that it has been acquired by Intuit. This very well could change by 2010.

I like Mint. It does a good job at helping you set-up a simple budget that get’s updated everytime you sync with your accounts. I agree with one of the other posts about Intuit/Quicken. I found it almost too feature rich which in turn made it difficult to use. I found it difficult to set-up a budget using Quicken. I would pay an annual fee for a Mint product with a little more capability yet still simple to use meeting the primary objective of setting up and managing my monthly budget.

That’s the purpose,… a start up’s out is required for capital investment,
by simply knowing there;s a company out there that would be able to do a buy out,
when in forced conflict, is where the expected return on investment is.
Not so much from the peripheral free product revenue.

How much more can you do with personal finance management. – well i do know a way
Let’s just hope people don’t realize your username and passwords to your real bank
accounts are stored on there servers, that’s how api’s access your real accounts.
Now there’s 2 possible security breaches in place of one.

it’s not a labor of love, it’s waiting for happy hour,…

BrianUI – UI Expert.

moostool2008
gmail.com

I was going to post at the Quicken/Intuit blog site but they closed comments on the acquisition.

I am a Quicken Premiere 2007 user (PC) that needs to abandon my PC (Vista problems) and is tired of needing to choose the platform my money management application will run on (formerly a Mac). It needs to be in the cloud and accessible by whatever I am using (Windows/Mac/Linux netbook/iPhone) wherever I am using it.

Looking at both Mint and Quicken Online I am coming to the conclusion that neither will satisfy my middle of the road needs.

Here is what it must do:
1) It must sync with all of my bank, credit card and brokerage accounts
2) I must be able to project cash flow for each account by pre-entering future expenses up to one year in advance
3) It needs to remind me of bills that need to be paid.
4) The data should be securely stored in the cloud.

I don’t mind paying a monthly/annual fee (because that means you are legally obligated in a binding relationship)

This being said – why is it so hard to find this information at either web site?
(basic info like what banks/institutions are supported) as well as more detail about how the product works.

I hope things work out for both groups (I know Intuit is much larger and has taken their eye off of personal money management for years) and gets to a place where it serves the various customer groups competing for your attention.

Will it be possible to move historical data files=currently on Quicken 2009- to MINT?

Joel

I for one would like to see the seemless account addition features of mint infused into Quicken ASAP. Quicken sucks at letting me add new accounts and makes me go through dialog questions I don’t want to take the time to answer. Mint.com just asks with whom is the account and what the credentials to login are. Easy. If quicken had this seemless functionality my life would be complete. At least the part that gets frustrated with financial software.

Hey you all, what does Mint’s management care about what will happen to Mint’s development culture now that they have $170,000,000 in there pockets?!?! Guess the old adage remains somewhat true: ” Everybody’s soul has a price ” Sadly. at the rate Mint was going, they could have took most of Quicken’s Online business anyways and in short time and even could have eventually even launch a desktop version as well to compete against Quicken’s desktop.

Mint’s management did everything right except they didn’t have a long term growth vision in their business plan that included resisting the eventual buyout enticements that they must have known would happen! There are some very bright posters above forecasting details of Mint’s probable demise and my humble intuition agrees wholeheartedly with their much more qualified forecasts.

Wow. I wish I would have read this before I signed up for Mint. I actually signed up for Mint because of how frustrated I am with Intuit and Quicken in general. Their service is absolutely HORRIBLE, and, with MSMoney out of the picture, it would seem it could only get worse. I tried Quicken Online and left it within weeks because it was so bloated.

I do love what I see at Mint, and I’ll keep my account with a grave sense of caution. Being a developer myself at a very large company, I see this same writing on the wall all the time. The poster who outlined the “takeover” scenario is spot on. Mint will slow to the crawl of their corporate master, being thrown deep into some org chart they will never find their way out of. There is no way around that. I’m sorry if the people at Mint believe differently, but, if you do, you’re deluding yourselves and are being snowed by the dollar signs. I can hear you saying, “No, that’s not true!”, and, for now, maybe it isn’t. But give it a year.

Now, instead of being the best competitor, you’ll be the most loyal slave. Sadly, as been said, everyone has a price. Who is going to resist that kind of money in this economy. It would have taken a totally different vision and game plan to resist that, so I don’t blame you.

But I am saddened by this news.

The minute Mint.com changes one bit for the worse then I’m gone. If Intuit decides to throw brand logos everywhere for Quicken, Turbotax, etc. or add advertisements that weren’t already there, then I’m bailing. Mint.com better not become a symbol of a great idea being ruined by corporate incompetence and misdirection. We the users are keeping a close eye on you!

I have just read through some of the comments here and have decided to give Mint/Intuit a try after being a very satisfied MS Money user for the past 4-5 years. In search of a replacement, I have discovered GNU Cash which runs on Windows, Mac OSX, BSD and Linux platforms and is fairly easy to install and set-up. One reason for selecting this application was because the data resides on my PC; however, it is cumbersome to try to use the application in a “from anywhere” or “from any device” mobile application model that some of us would like to have in a financial planner application. The upside is that your data will be as secure as your PC(device.)

Further, I was able to move the majority of my financial data into the system without too much additional editing of the data. The data that I did edit was mostly cosmetic and mostly due to my own changes to categories that I have made over the years. After creating the desired uniformity in the descriptions and categories of all of the accounts, I also noted that the system follows the more conventional “double entry” Accounting method for maintaining accuracy and storing data. The ‘canned’ reports are also lacking and the user interface is a bit drab. However, as it is open source there is no limit as to how one might customize it to fit their needs. (programmers)

In conclusion, thank you all for posting your comments and opinions about this product and how you think it might continue to develop. If there is anyone at Mint/Intuit that is counting opinions here is mine:

I am willing to pay a fair price for a feature rich Financial Planner application that is ‘uber’ secure, mobile, flexible, can accept multiple standard data formats (i.e. csv, xml, etc) for either input/output.

I just heard about Mint.com through a “personal finance” search. I used to be a Quicken desktop user, clean back to the early 90’s. I’ve read other’s people’s stories, and mine is a shade of in-between. I liked using the desktop product, but barely tapped all the features because it just seemed overwhelming. And because of that, I only upgraded every two years since there was not a significant value-added to me to upgrade annually. I stopped using Quicken for two reason: 1) I dreaded reinstalling/rebuilding after system crashes, upgrades, or losing data from storage system failures, and 2) I wanted something that I could use from any platform (e.g., not Windows), anywhere. I did start using Quicken online. I find that it’s not very helpful. I have better service using my online bill paying service that my bank offers. I don’t know if Mint.com is for me yet, but I will create an account. I don’t want just another neato way to do something, I want a more practical and enhanced way of doing the something with one account such that it will enable me to get rid of two others. I might even be willing to pay. I’ll be keeping my eye on the Mint/Intuit deal. I’m an optimist. Maybe a little naive, too.

What and when will be the first improvement on mint.com as a result of the merger?

I was just looking into other software to manage my personal finances. I only heard about Mint.com this weekend.

Ironically, it was to find something that would allow me to completely remove myself from anything Intuit.

As a long time Mac user, as well as a former Microsoft employee, it disgusts me to see companies that decide they want to cut Mac users off at the knees. I know why Microsoft has done it, because they want to sell more copies of Windows. Don’t let the Mac software stand out, because it will infringe upon their OS sales. Microsoft started writing their Office code on Windows years ago and then ported it over to the Mac, forcing the Mac software to be sluggish and sub-standard.

Adobe has been taking the same approach. They forgot their roots.

And Intuit? Shame on your guys. Why bother offering bread crumbs to the Mac users at all? You think you’re doing us a favor?

So I was just about to sign up for Mint.com until I read the news about this acquisition. Not now, not anymore.

Tom Peters spent time discussing this takeover mentality in his book Re-Imagine. Doubtful that Intuit is smart enough to allow the Mint.com team to operate fully independently from the rest of the company.

It’s too bad Mint.com’s vision was so small. Take the money and run, huh? In case you people forgot about Foxbase, which was one of the best databases ever, back on the Mac, you’ll remember Microsoft acquired them in I think 1991. Foxbase people were excited about coming over.

Microsoft bought the company so they could shelve the product. They took any leverage they could from their braintrust and incorporated it into MS Access.

Go on, Aaron, take your money and go to Bali or wherever you were planning on going.

And $170M? I’d have given you more credit if you held out for more.

*sigh* I was just getting ready to switch from Quicken 2009 (which I absolutely detest) to Mint. Now I’m just not sure. I was VERY angry when Quicken forced an upgrade on my earlier version of Quicken which broke downloading transactions. I resisted getting the new version for several months, but got fed up with manually downloading, editing the file to put the new tag in, then importing into Quicken. So, I broke down and bought it–thinking, well, at least I’ll get some cool new features. Imagine my surprise when instead of cool new features, I got the removal of features that I liked, new features which totally sucked, and forced ads on me all of the time. This for Quicken Deluxe!!!
So, Mint seemed like a breath of fresh air, only thing missing was scheduled transactions to track forecast. Now I see they belong to Intuit and am not sure whether to run screaming, forget entirely about managing my money, or make some Excel sheets myself!

First, congratulations! Not many entrepreneurs achieve successful exits, and Mint is a great idea executed really well. As an Intuit customer who feels trapped by Intuits predatory marketing practices, I can only hope that this acquisition will help to change the way Intuit behaves towards its customers, though I am truly sad at the loss of competition. Intuit has a strong and consistent pattern of locking its users into their apps through a combination of data portability and migration blocks (in both SaaS and desktop apps) and gradual feature takeaways widely reported on desktop apps with successive updates. For example, try to get your data out of quickbooks online in any form that is loadable into another accounting database. Or try to downgrade from one version of QB online to a less expensive version. Numerous migration paths are blocked by what looks like deliberate marketing decisions to keep me from being able to move my data freely.

So congratulations, but also please recognize that you have not been acquired by a company that is loved by its customers. Maybe you can do something about it.

The mesrging (or whatever) of Qicken and MINT.COM may seem good but remember this – A number of years ago when Parsons Software was still around and their “MONEY COUNTS” financial software (which ran circles around quicken) when Bob Parsons decided to get out of software, he sold out and guess what? Quicken (Intuit) bought him out and Money Counts became quicken property. 6 months later Money Counts was taken off the list of software available. Quicken bought out Patsons to get rid of Money Counts, their only competator. Now we have quicken buying out MINT.COM to do exactly the same. In 6 months MINT WON”T BE AROUND EITHER! Intuit and Qicken will not allow another financial software package on the market. It’s called buying out your competition!. Lots of luck!

Hi,

how about mint + Bill monk ? It would help me a lot !!!

Thanks

Santhip