If you're serious about financial tracking and don't mind paying $100 a year, there's a site called PocketSmith [0] that's a beautiful, clean, and fuller-featured version of Mint. They have a free version but it only supports credit card accounts and 12 budget categories. I just started using it two days ago and it blew me away.
They do have mortgage and investment accounts, but I've not been impressed with their investment planning tools. There isn't much in the way of historical trends, etc. Regardless, the checking / savings / credit aspect is incredibly detailed so it works well for me (not much real estate). It is pricey, but I am willing to pay to escape Mint's interface.
I've been thinking about that for a while. Besides a different design and time to reach feature parity, what would be the "unique" thing to solve the problem of managing one's finances?
I don't know if this exists (as someone who uses Mint but doesn't know the space well), but I would kill for a service that aggregates and simply reports my monthly bills for me. I don't need Mint's level of granularity and feature parity: I need a service that reminds me about the $5/mo I'm paying on a subscription that I haven't used in two years.
We do this rather well at MergePay (thanks for the mention twofishies) We give you a broad overview of you income, bills, and expenses daily/weekly/monthly and aggregate all your recurring bills and remind you either via email, SMS, or push if you use the mobile app, before they are due. I built it because I had the same issue.
As a hobby project, I'm working on a tool to help improve spending habits. I'm not crazy enough to imagine I'd ever reach feature parity with mint, but I personally know plenty of folks who use the well known personal finance tools yet seem to make a lot of careless purchases they later regret. And while mint is fine for what it does, I don't think it really points you in the direction of disciplined, thoughtful spending. If you want to stick to a budget but you find it hard, I think there's an opportunity for a more focused tool.
More than simply building a savings account, the other side of the coin is making your spending more meaningful by reducing impulsive buying. Saving a few bucks here and there with coupons or promotional discount is way too easy to spoil with just one thoughtless purchase.
I think gamification of "saving habits" would be very interesting - something to encourage you to save more. But it shouldn't take a lot of time to set-up or be confusing. If it would be automatic, even better.
The set up time is important- it seems to take too long to really get Mint set up to the point where it's useful, and then you still spend a lot of time recategorizing transactions so that you can know where your budgets really stand. I know that's not an easy problem to crack, but something with less detail that can encourage better overall spending/earning/savings trends would be pretty useful.
Yes. There's a ton of room for innovation and I don't have a lot of faith in Intuit to do any of it. I feel like I'm constantly thinking of things I'd improve about Mint.
I tried wikinvest, but it really just for brokerage accounts. I'm big into real estate. Currently, nothing fits my use case better than mint and mint is not ideal (e.g. can't do cashflow).
Also, I want a single place to see my networth as it's a huge factor in understanding my progression towards retirement. Having multiple interfaces makes this difficult.
I don't log in much nowadays, but I remember it is pretty easy to add asset values and get them figured into net worth. You have to keep manually-input stuff updated, of course.
Several of the companies that offer bank feeds ("add your account") use Yodlee's data.
I too have not found a solution for this, so I use a good old fashion spreadsheet. That said, I really wish something existed that did not require a monthly update on my part.
See my comment above. Where most of these tools fail is with investments (brokerages, 401k, and real estate). If yours can do that, I'm certainly interested.
Really, there's nothing out there for the power user. I believe that market would pay for a good product that doesn't try to push stuff on them (ahem... wealthfront).
If you're looking for a user with real estate assets, I'd be interested in helping by being a tester.
You are right. That there isn't much out there for the "power" users.
We (HelloWallet) are much more focused on holistic financial wellness. But we are working on some very exciting investment-oriented products as we speak.
It still would be interesting to get your perspective if you want to create an account:
Budgeting isn't really an issue for me (managing my savings and investments is). Until I can find a better site that supports mortgages and investments, mint works the best. Though, I'd be happy to try hellowallet once there are some more advanced features.
Looking to try out Hello Wallet as well. Signed up using the link, but not sure if it had hit the limit or not. There's nowhere inside the website to hit "upgrade" or see my account status.
