Mint Mobile

3.5 stars.

Pros:
-Does what it's supposed to do: Keeps basic track of my four bank accounts, three credit cards, savings, loans, investments, and even material assets. All in one place. This by itself makes it worth the download.
-Automatically files transactions into types. Super easy to see how much I spent on movies or grocery shopping.
-Lets you see trends during custom time periods so you can compare how much you spent at, say, coffee shops this month as compared to your monthly average.
-Lets you set budgets and alerts. My phone lets me know when I've exceeded my allowance for eating out, or am close to doing so.
-Makes it easy to invest and save, see where your money's really going, and stop spending $500 a month on Dominos and ATM fees so you can start putting something away for that house or that car.

Cons:
-Doesn't let you change its pre-selected categories for spending. Want a main category for your job expenses? Too bad. You'll have to create a custom sub-category under 'shopping' or some other preset main category.
-Inability to combine categories for budgeting. This one is really stupid, and users have been begging Mint to change it for four years. Want to have a budget for restaurants *andfast food together? Too bad. You can create a budget under 'food & dining', but then you're forced to include groceries as well. The only solution (without getting seriously creative) is to make two budgets - one for fast food and one for restaurants - and then ignore the one that's overspent because the other one is underspent. Want to make a budget for entertainment and eating out under one umbrella? Now you're way screwed. This would be so easy to fix, but Mint doesn't seem to care.
-Bugs. Not such a huge deal. Sub categories with special characters don't work under multi editing. My pet supply store kept getting filed as a restaurant until I made a rule to fix it. Other Little things, but none of them deal breakers.
-This does a great job at telling what you *spent*, not what your balances are and how much you have at the end of the day. Get comfortable with controlling what is spent, and you will relax in the knowledge that you don't have to know exactly how much is left. Just make a good budget on day 1, and use that as a reference. You won't run out of money unless you start going over your budget.

All in all, it's probably going to take you about five hours to really get good at 'Minting' - maybe more or less depending on how complex your finances are. Once you've figured out how to skate around the relatively clunky interface, figured out ways to get around the lack of a few simple options they never thought to include, and set up all your accounts, budgets, categories and rules, this can give you a relatively easy and perhaps unprecedented level of power over your money. And once your system is in place, it only takes a couple of minutes a week to glance at it and make sure all is smooth sailing. Anyone who has trouble with spending and saving (yours truly) could greatly benefit, especially if you know someone who is already very comfortable with Mint. If you don't, then check out the blog at mint.com/blog.

And remember: It's only money.

Been using Mint for over eight years. When it works, it works well, & can be an excellent place to aggregate most - if not all - of your financial accounts. For those times when you may have an account for which Mint does not have a working connection, there is frequently a tolerable workaround. I use it every day.
So, why two stars…?
Imagine being in a very well-established, long-term intimate relationship with someone who, one day, out of the blue, started asking you for validation literally every time you engaged them one-on-one.
“Do you still like me?” Yes. If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t have called y-
“Am I still pretty?” Yes… as I said yesterd-
“Does this upgrade make my [redacted] look fat?” *sigh…no.
“Do you still like it when I [action]?” *mutteringJFC. Yes!
“Do you want me to keep doing [action]?” For the fifth, Mother Hubbarding time, YES!
“How about when I don’t [action]? Do you still like me then?”
*face palm*
You’d probably gently ask your lover to seek therapy, right? Now imagine if this romantic partner started emailing you in the middle of the day. “You haven’t looked at me since last night. Is there something I did wrong? What can I do to get you to like me more?”
You might start to regret allowing this person to leave her toothbrush at your apartment. You might feel sad that things changed, wishing the person would go back to the way she was when you first allowed her into your life. You’d probably even start to secretly wonder if there was someone else who was less needy-neurotic…
I know I would.
Speaking for myself, I came to start using Mint after a trusted friend recommended it to me. All of the people I know who use it do so because I recommended it to them. And while there likely people I know (and do not know) who use Mint because they were looking for a solution on the App Store & saw its star rating, word-of-mouth continues to be the most sure-fire way for developers to win new, long-term adherents.
To Mint’s developers: if you’ll look at our history together, & note the times I’ve engaged the financial solutions you’ve recommended, you’ll find that it was when you were NOT asking me for validation every [redacting] time I executed an action in your [redact] [redacted] app. Seriously: you’ve got the recos down pat. That is, gentle, & well-targeted.
The key for users like myself to *takethe cheese being offered on the mousetrap is (*drumroll*) TRUST.
Trust is fostered by reliability, predictability, & consistency; the latter being the catalyst. Asking me for validation every [redactor] [redacting] time I open the app, and then again when I execute an already tedious action (made all-the-more-tedious by having to respond to your absolutely and completely un-necessary neurotic pop-up questions;“ArE yOu SuRe?”) does NOT foster trust. You didn’t pepper me with validation questions before; now you do. It is an unexpected, wholly unnecessary query, that makes the experience DIFFERENT (in a bad way) from what I’ve come to expect from Mint, which is the definition of inconsistent.
I feel certain that there are other apps that can do what Mint does, and while I don’t want to have to migrate over to another & go through the trouble of learning to use it - because doing so is just a bit more of a PITA than putting up with Mint’s neuroses - I will if the inconsistencies continue to compound.

I love mint. It’s been a boon for helping me save and get my finances under control. For years, I had the app but never managed to make using it a habit, and budgeting always seemed to be in this black box. But, now I use it every single day, and I’ve dramatically improved how much I’m saving. How I’ve managed to do this came from seeing a friend use it immediately before of after making a transaction; part of the process for her was going in and moving money from one budget to another, so each month her budgets were slightly different; I thought that was a cool concept, and when I made it a goal to use the app every single day, after every transaction, (and I set up a habit-tracker reminding me to log in every day until it became habit) that’s when I, too, became hooked. That said, there are some issues:
• The synching needs work, but you obviously already know that because you asked me to resync my bank. BUT, this is DEEPLY flawed in its current form because when I did that, carefully following the provided instructions, it then added that account as if it was another separate account, duplicating all of my transactions. This is a big no no, because it’s not like I can just delete my old account, because I’ve painstakingly gone in and done the work categorizing transactions so they’re under the right category, adding notes, etc, so it’s not like I can just delete my old account. Therefore the new one was what got deleted. I pray they fix this before forcing the transition, otherwise mint is going to lose the business of a TON of people overnight.

And things that could take this app from good to great...

• Allowing you to split transactions before they’ve been fully accepted. For the people who truly use the app every day to get the most out of it, this is pretty frustrating, because I handle transactions as they come in, so by the time a payment is no longer marked as pending, I’ve forgotten that I need to split it.
• More robust spending trends. I’d like to be able to see bar charts with month over month spending by category, just as I do with everything else
• I wish you could see the pie graphs summaries for a year back, not just the current month
• I wish all of the budgets and trends graphs/info could go *at leasta year back, not just the past 6 months. I rarely use mint on my computer (prefer to do so on my phone), so I want to see how my spending has changed over time
• An ability to have two types of summaries at the top in the “budgets” section: one for “spending money” and the current one representing the total. There were a few months when I wasn’t paying rent/bills, and it was so nice having the progress bar with the date because I could check and see how I was doing in terms of my overall spending. But now, this feature is much less helpful because my rent payments aren’t due until late in the month, so it is hard to tell at a glance how well I’m doing in terms of spending. It would be nice to be able to have some way to see how much liquid capital I have left, and enter planned/recurring payments (e.g. rent at the very least; would be nice if you could also do this for Netflix, gym memberships, etc) so that I can see how much money I genuinely have to draw from for my spending. A way to get around this and have the top summary only reflect spending money would be not to budget for those things and when they come in, change the category to “hide from budget and trends”, but I don’t want to do this, because I use Mint as a way to see where I’m putting my money over time, see areas where I’m spending too much so I can evaluate whether or not I want to keep those subscriptions, etc. An alternative would be to add a budget category “recurring expenses/subscriptions” and categorize expenses under that, but then you have the same problem.

(Low rating for attention, will update!)
To the developers:
First of all, this app/system is amazing and I’ve been using it for a long time. I received an email about a survey for improvements but I missed the deadline so I was asked to leave a detailed review here instead. I do have some small ideas for improvement, simply because of how loyal I am to this program.
Most of the tweaks I’m suggesting have to do with making the Transaction Categories slightly more customizable. I know you can add your own, but I’d LOVE to be able to edit and delete (or at the very least hide!) the default ones. So that’s my first request! I’ve made my account so that I’m only ever using categories that I created (for optimal consistency and organization), and I’ve numbered them all so that they show up first alphabetically. It should be a simple change to make, but as of now the lack of this feature is annoying for two main reasons: 1. It’s just messy and sloppy to see so many extra Main Categories/Sub-Categories that I’m not even using (and the last thing I want to feel when it comes to my money is “messy” or “sloppy”), and 2. It provides more opportunity for myself and for the program to get confused and mis-categorize a Transaction, meaning Budgets and Trends are skewed. The more [unused] options there are, the higher the margin of error.
The second new feature I would suggest is to include an option for Category descriptions. That way when I’m trying to decide how to categorize a Transaction for a shaving cream purchase for example, I don’t have to try and remember if that goes with my bath supplies Category or with my cosmetics Category. I could look at my Descriptions and see that my bath supplies category only includes shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and bubble bath… furthermore I see that it states shaving cream in my cosmetics Category Description, so I would know that shaving cream has historically belonged to my cosmetics Category, I can now properly categorize the Transaction remain consistent. Maybe in the future the system could even use the Descriptions to make better educated guesses as to how to categorize unique purchases. (I am aware that you can change the category rules, so usually the auto-categorize for my transactions gets really close. But I travel a lot and my husband travels a lot and we have three kids, so we make a lot of unique/one-time purchases that I don’t always have rules set up for.) This would also make the character limit on homemade Categories’ names a nonissue. And for future reference, I will always be a huge fan of anywhere the system will allow me to make notes!
It may also be handy to make subcategories within subcategories (add another level). So that would be my third suggestion. Sometimes I want to be able to see how much of my money is going toward something more specific. (Being informed is the first step toward cutting down on bad spending habits! And that’s what this app is all about for me and my family.) For example, if I want to know how much I’m spending on soda or wine at the grocery store, I would need another level as an option to categorize a portion of my grocery Transaction (Food>Groceries>Soda or Food>Groceries>Wine/Alcohol). This would obviously require me to manually Split my Grocery Transaction but at least the option would be there for us, and this way the funds I put toward drinks would still fall under the umbrella of my total Grocery budget.
I have a few Categories that I named in part so that I would to remember to include something semi-related (think back to the shaving cream example), so partly as a reminder to myself I made my own category that included both of those types of transactions. And you can see how including extra sub-Category options would also help alleviate the Category name character limit issue.
Lastly, it would be awesome to do more with financial Goals on Mint. I’ve heard this is a common suggestion among users. I do have more bank accounts than most (7), but I also have way more Mint financial Goals than most (20)... and I would have even more on there if that were plausible. So, it would be great if you could assign more than one goal to an account. My solution would be allowing users to set a percentage of that account’s funds toward a certain goal. For example, say I have a checking account that I want to assign two goals to... maybe I set the goals for that account as 60% of those funds being dedicated to goal #1 and 40% of those funds being dedicated to goal #2. Then every time the account balance changes, all of (or in this example, both of) the goals linked to that account would update according to the set percentage, and continue to show progress accordingly. (This means that all linked goals would change with an account balance change.) Once a goal is completed, perhaps with Advanced Options, the user could decide with a toggle switch where the leftover balance should be assigned. It could default to either another goal linked to that account (overriding the set percentage of the account balance) or go unassigned (as extra funds do now in Mint).
Some other random ideas for improvement would be to be able to house pictures/scans of receipts (for tax or other purposes) on Transactions, adding a graphs section for Trends, and potentially an easier way to import data from a banking or online shopping website or export to a spreadsheet.
Anyway, as I’ve stated countless times before, I LOVE this app and the accompanying desktop site. I use them every day and swear by them which is why I’m so anxious for improvement... these are literally the only things I’ve even thought of that I could possibly want to change. I LOVE this app/program and I LOVE what you guys are doing. I could not survive financially without the knowledge you’re empowering me with on a daily basis! Keep up the great work and thank you for developing, and for continually looking to improve our household essential Mint! ❤️

App has several bugs, most more a function of Mint than the app itself. Several institutions do not trust mint and block its access, limiting its utility. Mint’s account linking process doesn’t work with two factor authentication, further reducing what accounts it can track. Its algorithms are stubborn. Once it has made up its mind what category a frequently made transaction should be under, there is nothing you can do to change its mind. I eat at a certain restaurant chain frequently. Every time I spend money there, Mint will change the name on the transaction to some random nonsense and file it under “kids” even though every previous time I filed it under “restaurants”. I have one financial institution with several accounts. The mint app says the login information for those accounts is incorrect and can’t connect and pushes non-stop notifications that it can’t connect, even though it does connect and update those accounts regularly. Finally, the latest annoyance is that it seems to have taken up a crusade to question how much money my children have. They each have a savings account with money they’ve received as birthday gifts-not much, a few hundred bucks, reasonable (I think) for young children. Mint has recently taken to sending a non-stop barrage of notifications that the balances of those accounts are in the range of only a few hundred dollars, not the several hundreds of thousands that mint feels a child savings account should have. I absolutely must do something right now, right this very second, so my kids have more money. My mint app is losing sleep at night agonizing that at this rate, my kids won’t be able to buy a fleet of Bentleys in cash on their 16th birthday. And so it pushes notification after notification after notification screaming about the sad multi-hundred dollar balances in a couple children’s savings accounts. I really don’t need that in a budgeting app.

EDIT 2 after developer response: I DID delete my accounts from your app, both when I initially deleted the app after realizing that you were accessing my information without my knowledge or consent and after I decided to give it another go a couple years later and found it chaotic to deal with at best. I literally had to go through EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION to reclassify them because they were ALL wrong. Not one was correct. Who decided that my rent was actually eating out and my bills were actually "movies"? Oh yeah, you guys. It was counting transfers between accounts as transactions, my paycheck as a "transfer" instead of income, and registering my credit card balance as double what it actually is. This app has massive problems and is a headache and a half that I don't need to deal with. I really only wanted the app to track my 401k and HSA account anyway, but there wasn't even support for my HSA account. So no, I am out of "patience and understanding" and won't be coming back or contacting support for the issues. I found Mint worse than useless, as it would have taken me hours to get it into a roughly usable state and that's just something I can 100% do without. Thanks for nothing.

EDIT 1: Decided to give this app another try and just found it annoying and inaccurate. I'd have to rename and reclassify every transaction because they were all wrong. It also just doesn't fit my budgeting style at all. Deleted again.

Original Review, posted long before edits 1 and 2: I used Mint for budgeting for nearly two years and was moderately happy with it until I realized it was accessing my accounts on its own without my knowledge or consent. I swear it only used to sync to my accounts when I opened the app or logged into my account online and prompted it to, but I went a while without doing either and it was still syncing my accounts. No thanks, I’d really like to control if/when my accounts are accessed by a third party. Deleted the app and my account.

Mint has enormous potential but it has some very frustrating bugs in the most basic and crucial features that have been persisting for months now. I’ve sent more than plenty of feedback through the integrated feedback feature but it seems that no one pays attention to them (even left a contact email once so I could help clarify any questions the product team might need to correct these issues)

1. Don’t even try to categorize a transaction while its still pending. It’ll change once it moves from pending to the original category auto assigned by Mint.

2. Even after waiting for transaction to
move from pending to completed. I have to check back a handful of times to make sure they stay in the category I assigned to them. The app CONSTANTLY recategorizes transactions back to their original auto assigned category and it messes up the budget tracking. It has been really frustrating to have to monitor this.

3. Furthermore, when you split transactions there is a high probability that the transaction will duplicate, triplicate, etc, depending on how many splits you made. E.g. if I split a 100$ cash withdrawal transaction into 3 different transactions (25$ groceries, 25$ gas and fuel, 50$ shopping) these 3 transactions will likely reappear as a 100$ groceries, 100$ gas and fuel, 100$ shopping, in a couple of days and you have to go back in to hide these, split the original once more and pray that they stay that way.

4. The “Rules” feature is absolutely useless.

These bugs are not one offs, they’re how the application is currently working

I really want to love Mint but there’s a clear disinterest in their software developing efforts to make the platform as perfect, seamless and foolproof as possible.

I’ve been a premium users for about 6 months now and am currently disappointed with how the basic most important features for this type of budgeting applications are full of bugs. It almost seems like they made the platform “good enough” and left it running with no intentions of monitoring, improving, and updating.

I started using this app September and hadn’t had issues with it until January (so I thought). For whatever reason the app stopped correctly counting my overall spend of the month though it was correctly accounted for in the individual budgets for the month. I reached out to customer service and they escalated my issue to higher management. About a month later I receive the following response:
“We appreciate your patience while we looked into this for you. After investigating the issue, we found that there may be quite a few transactions that don't belong to any of the budgeted categories.

Setting up budgets for the categories or the parent categories should ensure the spends are accounted for in budgets.”

Obviously I’m aware that setting up budgets for the categories will ensure the spends are accounted for in budget. That’s literally the fundamental use of the budgets. It’s almost comical that I waited a month for that response and no solution to my issue. Furthermore the transactions are being accounted for within the individual budgets but not the overall. My ability to use the budget tool is not the issue... I have been trying to investigate the issue on my own and realize that the “everything else” section is not calculating my spending accurately either. “Everything Else” is your monthly spend not accounted for in the budgets you create but Mint is still supposed to keep a total of the spend. Realized it sporadically has not been calculating correctly since I started using the app in September .

The point of this app is to help you track your spending and budget but if it doesn’t calculate your spending correctly is it fulfilling its purpose? I’m currently waiting for the customer service line to open so that I can have my account deleted. It’s unfortunate I have had this ongoing issue that their customer service team is incapable of resolving. Also wondering what the point of the customer service team is if they can’t resolve your issue and send generic feedback. I wish it were possible to give a 0 star rating because it would accurately reflect my personal experience.

Wow this are getting bad...I could not write a new review without cutting and pasting to move the old review out of the way.

Well the new, but old unresolved issue that I previously reported on the app itself was my budget categories ie Gas and Groceries the amount do not add up. I m showing g I spent way more in a category than I actually spent. This is messing up my budgeting it pushing me over budget and I am not. For example, I have actually spent close to $60 in Gas yet that budget bar reads I have spent $80. The calculator for that field is off and also on Groceries I spent $40 and I am showing over $100 spent. Please fix!

Never experienced these issues previously and it goes unresolved for too long. Very leery of what Mint’s capabilities are now. Can you fix? Updating accounts takes forever, the bills section on the second landing page disappears from time to time. The Cashflow section was changed (see below) to something useless
to me from it’s original format. Asked
Time and again to be changed back, but nothing. I must say, it’s maybe time to look for another budgeting app. Been with Mint since 2012, would hate to leave...it’s not been working and I used to live this app. Now this too much going wrong and remaining unfixed days without number.

Previous Review still here:
Where is the Original Monthly Cashflow

You need to bring back the original Monthly Cashflow section. Remove the graphs and bring back ALL transactions sorted by category and sorted by merchant. You brought back an abbreviated version that does not include any income - BIG MISTAKE! This section only works properly with each and every transaction we make!

Take Action! Fix this!
It is NOT for spending alone. You must have all cashflow (incoming & outgoing). Incoming like every paycheck, deposit, manual income and every debit from the accounts manual or otherwise. Therefore, it cannot remain in the “Monthly Spending” section as the original was never just for spending only. BRING back the original monthly cashflow section ! IT IS TIME! FIX THIS!

PS. . You added back some income but left out so much more. You need the original program for that section before the fatal update a couple of months ago. Just cut and paste and relocate it back to the cashflow section! We know it was a colossal mistake now please fix it!

Update - 5/202020
Same issue. Mint overwrites 95% of my transactions’ subject line feed that comes from the bank with a “Transfer from 401K” text string from some long-forgotten entry I made once. :-(

Update - 5/22
It's still messed up a year later.
I like the addition of bill pay, but I'm stuck with some rogue rule that _never learns_. It always renames my Merchant name to the same old incorrect and unrelated title from some transaction I did years ago. A year ago, they said it would unlearn that behavior, but after more than a year, it simply hasn't. It still renames 80% of the pending (and later the committed) transactions to this obsolete title. This seems minor, but I'm keeping up with lots of transactions (from 3 people's spending) and it is a pain to have to correct the Merchant name on almost every transaction on my phone keypad. It also classifies these rogue Merchant name changes as transfers, so they don't show up in graphs nor reports. A pain.

It would be nice if I could at least touch the original Merchant name (as correctly supplied by the bank) and overwrite its mistake, but the iOS app won't even let you do that. Ughhh! C grade - and regressing ...

4/21
Good, but still has a few annoying bugs. It wildly reassigns the names of my transactions to one stuck phrase, for which I don't even have a rule set up. It is very annoying to have to rename almost every transaction from that stuck phrase. I've mentioned this to the team, but the only solution they gave was to "give it time correct itself" (now ~6 months and 1000s of transactions) or create a new account. I think that's because they don't believe it's a real bug in their app. Also, you can't cut and paste from the original transaction description to the (broken) one. That would at least speed up the editing I have to do because of the bug.

It does work better on my 64 gig iPhone 5 than on the smaller memory devices.

Previous ======
Wonderful app. Shows me just what I need to know - better than the full desktop for succinct presentation of my (rather complex!) financial state.
Only gripe is that OS4 on my 8G 3G iPhone stinks in performance and eventually exits :-(. I put that down to Apple - though I assume Mint could fix this if they wanted to in the app design. Might require parallel code paths which they probably won't opt to do. Still a great app!

I purchased a MINT sim card for $68.85 on 03/29/2022. The funds were taken from my bank account on 03/30/2022. When I tried to activate the simcard on 04/29/22 it did not work. I called MINT customer service and they said the order had been cancelled and refunded. I never received a refund. I also never received a confirmation email from MINT. I looked back at the letter that came with my SIM card and see it is addressed to a different customer in a different state. Clearly, our orders were mixed up, and the other customer got my refund. All I want is the money I paid to be refunded because the product sent to me did not work. After one hour on the phone to MINT, they refused to refund me, refused to give me a different number to call, and refused to receive evidence of my payment by email. Essentially, $68.85 was taken from my account for a product that I never received, and they are refusing to refund it. The fact that the wrong name is on the confirmation slip clearly shows a mistake on their end, and I'm shocked that MINT mobile won't refund me, or refer me to anyone else for further support.

I ordered Mint Mobile sim card kits for my 2 phones. It seemed safe to do so as it carries a refund if you contact them with in the first 7 days after you activate your sim cards. After them trying for 5 days to get the phones activated, I gave up and requested a refund. They sent me an email back that said "we are unable to process your refund, as it is outside our refund policy". That is all it said and their customer service now ignores my emails. Thanks.