Goodbye, Mint: What We Tried and Where We Landed

Intuit announced in November 2023 that Mint was closing, and on 23 March 2024 it did. Users were pointed at Credit Karma, which Intuit had bought in 2020 and which is not a budgeting app — it shows you balances and a net worth number, but the budgeting that people actually used Mint for did not survive the move.

So a lot of households went looking at once, ours included. Here is what we tried and what we settled on.

We have a financial interest in one of these tools. The disclosure is at the bottom, before the link, and it is specific. Read it before you decide what this article is worth.

What we were actually looking for

Not features. Every one of these apps has more features than we use.

We run zero-based budgeting — every dollar gets a job before the month starts. That was not up for negotiation. The method works, and we were not shopping for a new one. We were shopping for a tool that would run it without becoming a second job.

We also only needed the budgeting half. CJ keeps the actual books in Quicken, so we were not looking for an accounting system. The job was narrower than that: see where the money is actually going, month over month, accurately enough to decide what could be redirected at debt and savings. Where did it go, and what can we move.

And it had to be something two people would actually open. A budget that one spouse maintains and the other never looks at is not a household budget, it is a spreadsheet with an audience of one. The tool nobody opens is worse than a worse tool that both of you do.

YNAB

YNAB is the most rigorous of the three, and if the method suits you it is probably the most effective. It is built on zero-based budgeting — every dollar you have gets assigned a job before you spend it, and when you overspend a category you have to move money from another one and watch yourself do it.

That friction is deliberate and it is the point. It is also the reason it did not stick for us. YNAB asks you to sit down and do something on a regular schedule, and it is unforgiving when you fall behind — come back after three weeks away and you have a reconciliation job waiting rather than a dashboard.

Choose YNAB if you want the method to change your behavior, you will do the weekly sit-down, and you are the kind of person who finds the discipline satisfying rather than exhausting. Plenty of people are. We weren’t.

EveryDollar

EveryDollar is also zero-based, and simpler than YNAB — fewer concepts, a gentler on-ramp. It is built by Ramsey Solutions and it is designed around their approach, which matters mostly in that the app assumes you are following a particular sequence.

What ended it for us was the categorizing. Every transaction has to be put into a budget line by hand. Not typed in — connect your accounts on the paid tier and they arrive on their own — but each one still has to be placed into an envelope before the budget means anything. Nothing is quietly learning that this merchant is groceries and that one is gas.

That is not a defect, it is the method. Deliberate allocation is the whole idea of envelope budgeting, and the moment you decide where a dollar goes is where the behavior change is supposed to happen. But it is a standing chore, and with two people and two schedules the queue got ahead of us. A budget you are three weeks behind on is not telling you anything, and the honest outcome was that we stopped opening it.

Choose EveryDollar if you want zero-based budgeting with less machinery than YNAB, or you are already working that method and want the tool built for it — and if placing each transaction yourself is something you want to do rather than something you will quietly stop doing.

Monarch

Monarch is the one we kept.

It is worth knowing that Monarch was co-founded by Val Agostino, who was Mint’s first product manager, and that the company has been fairly open about building the thing he thought Mint should have become. That lineage shows. If you are coming from Mint it feels familiar in a way the others do not.

What actually made it stick for us was more boring than any feature list:

Rules do the categorizing. You write a rule once — rename this merchant, always file it as groceries — and it applies to what arrives from then on. The sorting stops being a chore you perform every week and becomes a thing you set up once and correct occasionally. That is precisely what beat us in EveryDollar, and it is most of why Monarch stuck.
It still runs zero-based. We did not give up the method to get the automation. We give every dollar a job the same as before; the difference is that the transactions file themselves against those jobs instead of waiting for one of us to do it by hand.
You can budget forward. This is the one we miss least about Mint. Mint made you wait until a month had started before you could build its budget. Monarch lets you plan next month, or the rest of the year, whenever you want. That matters most in the two months a year when a biweekly paycheck lands three times — you can decide in February that August’s third check goes against the debt, instead of discovering the surplus in September after it has quietly been absorbed.
It is built for two people. Households are first-class, not an add-on. We both see the same picture without one of us being the administrator of it.
It does not punish you for looking away. Come back after two weeks and you have a dashboard, not a backlog. For us that was the difference between a tool we use and a tool we used to use.

Here is the honest trade, because there is one. Monarch will not make you do it. YNAB enforces zero-based budgeting — overspend a category and you have to visibly take the money from somewhere else. Monarch lets you set a budget and then quietly ignore it, and nothing will stop you. We wanted the tool to remove the clerical work, not the discipline, and we bring the discipline ourselves. If what you actually need is a tool that refuses to let you off the hook, that is YNAB, and you should go use YNAB.

There is no free tier. You pay for Monarch, and you should not sign up expecting Mint’s price.

Not “use Monarch.” Use the one you will both open.

If your household has one person who handles money and the other who would rather not, the tool matters less than the shared habit — pick whichever one gets you both looking at the same screen once a month, and the specific app is a detail.

And whichever you pick, the number you need out of it is what you can put toward your goals each month. That is the one figure every debt plan depends on, and most people cannot answer it until they go and look.

The disclosure, and the link

We use Monarch. We paid for it before we had a referral link to share, and we would still be using it if this paragraph did not exist.

But we are paid if you sign up through our link. Monarch sends the referring household a gift card once a referred person connects an account and pays for an annual subscription. That is a real financial incentive for us to have written this article, and you should weigh what you have just read accordingly — the whole reason this site exists is that most money advice online is written by someone with an incentive they did not mention.

So here is ours, mentioned. And here is the link:

Monarch — 50% off your first year

Read this part before you click, because the discount has conditions and we would rather you knew them than felt tricked. The 50% applies to the annual Core plan, signed up for on the web. Monthly plans are not eligible, the Plus tier is not eligible for the first-year discount, and subscriptions started through the Apple App Store or Google Play do not qualify either. If you sign up on your phone you will likely not get the discount. Terms are Monarch’s and they change them from time to time — theirs is the version that counts, not ours.

If you would rather not use our link, that is completely fine. Monarch is easy enough to find, and we would rather you picked the right tool than the one that pays us.