If you’ve been using Intuit’s Mint app to help you budget, automatically collect your expenses, put them in useful categories, and remind you to pay them, then you were probably a bit shocked to find out that Intuit will be folding Mint into its other financial service, Credit Karma, as of January 1st, 2024.
Credit Karma’s main service is to offer advice about financial products based on your credit score, which means this may be a good fit depending on how many of Mint’s features will be moved to Credit Karma. But it’s too soon to tell. (According to Intuit, “some of the most popular Mint-like features are available on Intuit Credit Karma,” which isn’t the most encouraging phrase I’ve ever seen.)
So this could be a problem for a lot of current Mint users. The service, which became part of Intuit’s library of financial software in 2009, has been popular as an app for people who don’t know that much about finances and don’t really want to know. It tracks expenses, helps you create a budget, and warns you if you’re getting into trouble. (It also, like many free commercial financial apps, keeps up a constant drumbeat of promoting various credit cards, bank accounts, and other products.)
Luckily, there are now other apps out there that can also offer similar services. None of them are free, and none of them are quite Mint-like, but they could be useful if you need something to help you stay within a budget or save toward a goal. Here are four worth checking out.
Quicken is, of course, one of the better-known financial app companies, and it has a load of different products. Quicken Simplifi is the most basic, and obviously the company is hoping that it can gain some users from Mint’s exit. How do I know? Because Simplifi didn’t originally allow for a trial period — it’s the only product listed here that didn’t — but you can now have a three-month trial period (the longest of the apps covered here) before you have to start paying its…