Money management app? - I know it's dangerous but work with me

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Friend of Dorothy Parker

Friend of Dorothy Parker

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Oct 27, 2021
A million years ago I used mint. It sucked in many ways, mostly due to inability to connect or losing connection with various accounts. And now apparently it's gone and users are being referred over to credit karma. OK. Haven't tried ck as a mint replacement, though from what I've read the features are fewer, and for whatever reason I don't quite trust them.

And yes, I'm sure it's a bad idea to link everything - but hypothetically, if I wanted to pull in all of my various banking, investment, and payment accounts to one place and be able to categorize spending without 75 steps involving exporting and manual everything, is there a best solution? I saw a couple things - monarch, simplefi (simplifi? Idk), robot something - but I can't try them without linking everything, and I don't want to do that in more places than minimally necessary.

So, any positive/negative experiences, or alternatives? I'm not ignoring security, but my primary drivers are efficiency and getting a full & central view of what I have and where I stand. If that is possible.
 
I've been using Empower/Personal Capital for many years.

Pros:
  • Free
  • Connections have worked 99.9% of time for my accounts (YMMV, there are some I leave manual because their vendor doesn't support it or it's not worth tracking).
  • I like their UI/UX with the graphs and all
  • Retirement/expense ratio/savings calculator is nice
  • You can manually change merchant/budget categories for transactions if they're incorrect or you want to specialize it.

Cons:
  • They'll cold call bug you to utilize their advisor services if you have a large amount of assets but once I told them I wasn't interested and ignored them moving forward they more or less fucked off.
  • Customer service tickets take forever if something's glitchy.
  • Never got their mobile app push notification 2FA to work properly so I have to use text message every time to verify my login.

If you have a Fidelity account, then you can use their Fidelity Full View app. I've tried it a bit and it's okay. UX is much better with Empower/Personal Capital imo.
 
User names must be unique said:
How bad are American banks that something like this is even needed? I've seen shit like this advertised before but it's all basic features on the bank apps I'm with.
Click to expand...
The bank app I have does too. It's just that these money management apps are shilled hard over here, especially Rocket, from the Rocket Mortgage.
 
User names must be unique said:
How bad are American banks that something like this is even needed? I've seen shit like this advertised before but it's all basic features on the bank apps I'm with.
Click to expand...
You can gather all bank and investment accounts, and bills and expenses (and categorize them), through your bank? I have a number of accounts at different banks, but they don't connect to other accounts (banking, credit, commerical/utilities) and allow me to categorize every transaction, regardless of the method I used to pay.
 
Have you tried an excel spreadsheet? It's easy and won't leak your data directly to advertisers. How the hell is this complicated?
 
User names must be unique said:
How bad are American banks that something like this is even needed? I've seen shit like this advertised before but it's all basic features on the bank apps I'm with.
Click to expand...

It started to get complicated if you have your wealth spread over multiple institutions. For instance I have a brokerage and checking in one bank, a joint checking in another, credit cards at multiple banks etc.
 
Friend of Dorothy Parker said:
for whatever reason I don't quite trust them.
Click to expand...
Credit Karma was originally created for reddit and now it's part of Intuit. That said, they really aren't bad.

User names must be unique said:
How bad are American banks that something like this is even needed? I've seen shit like this advertised before but it's all basic features on the bank apps I'm with.
Click to expand...
Henya's Revenge said:
The bank app I have does too. It's just that these money management apps are shilled hard over here, especially Rocket, from the Rocket Mortgage.
Click to expand...
Friend of Dorothy Parker said:
You can gather all bank and investment accounts, and bills and expenses (and categorize them), through your bank? I have a number of accounts at different banks, but they don't connect to other accounts (banking, credit, commerical/utilities) and allow me to categorize every transaction, regardless of the method I used to pay.
Click to expand...
CHARizard said:
It started to get complicated if you have your wealth spread over multiple institutions. For instance I have a brokerage and checking in one bank, a joint checking in another, credit cards at multiple banks etc.
Click to expand...
I've seen these at credit unions, but I don't know about banks.
 
If you use your CC for most (or all) purchases, major banks (Chase, BofA, etc.) can break down your spending on that CC by category. So you can hook up your bills to autopay on that card, and then you'd have at least a starting point that's been automated for you and doesn't require sharing all your financial info with Quickbooks or whomever. It's not perfect, though; some stores like Costco aren't going to be sorted properly (since you can get such a wide variety of goods there.)
 
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