Mint.com is shutting down and migrating users to Credit Karma in early 2024, with an unclear feature migration plan. As someone who uses/has tested dozens of tools, here is my take if you are looking for a replacement.
I love Empower, but one thing I struggle with is how to think about the topline net worth it reports vs. what my net worth would be if I actually liquidated my portfolio (due to tax on capital gains). I'm curious if there's a convenient way that you've found to think about that easily (e.g., is there a tool/platform that aggregates/estimates this), or is the only real way to manually calculate your cost basis from your investment accounts?
I have not found a good tool that will "easily" maintain your cost basis information. Quicken has some of this available, but it is a royal pain to keep it in sync with reality. You need to manually adjust every single sale otherwise it goes out of whack.
I wouldn't overthink it though. That seems more of an interesting fact vs something you need to know on an ongoing basis. I don't imagine very many scenarios that involve full liquidation.
Great recap. I personally have remained on Excel sheets but there’s definitely a trade off in terms of it being more manual. Although that has helped make my numbers stick better in my head by doing everything by hand.
Super easy budgeting features. Lots of stats on trends for month over month and year over year. Full picture of your net worth. Idk, has all the typical features but it’s just really nicely executed. I stopped logging into brokerage accounts and bank accounts to check things. Copilot has become my one stop shop
Empower does not have all the credit unions. Example Virginia Credit Union the largest in the state is not included. Also they don't include all the credit card companies or mortgage companies.
I really want to try Monarch but I can’t help but worry a bit about the security side of things. Any thoughts on that? Feels like the stakes are somewhat high when linking accounts like this.
There are some threads on the subreddit trying to get some info on compliance eg with SOC2. No response from the team so far.
Plaid and Finicity are the ones doing most the heavy lifting and all permissions are read only.
That coupled with having 2fac across accounts leaves me comfortable with the trade offs.
I also see a trend where more and more of the larger players are establishing direct connection types (again mostly through plaid and finicity) so you have multiple layers of compliance requirement in a space where trust is key. We are long pass the time where janky scrapers were actually logging in as you to get your data.
The security side is where I am sure plenty of the readers have a deeper level of expertise than I do. Curious your major worries?
Hey Andre! Great article. I have a couple of questions about personal capital.
1. The Savings Planner always picks up incorrect transactions as savings and I never get an accurate view of how much I save in a year from the tool. What has your experience been like ? Do you do any manual tagging or corrections ?
2. Emergency fund - This isn't a huge deal but it bothers me. The emergency fund only takes checking/savings accounts into consideration. I have a dedicated fidelity account for emergency funds and it's all in CDs. Is there a way to tag accounts as emergency funds so that it shows up correctly within PC ?
#1 seems to naturally net out correctly for me without too much intervention. It is only looking at transfers in and out for each account. So I'll have some very negative (ie transferring all my RSUs out) and others very positive (receiving the RSU transfer in) with the overall being in the right ball park. You can go through an look at all "Transfers" to see if there are items incorrectly tagged, although bulk edits are a pain.
#2 This one kills me too. It is a surprising limitation across many tools. I have a similar issue in Quicken. Monarch does allow me to classify my FIdelity cash account as a checking account or any other account type.
I love Empower, but one thing I struggle with is how to think about the topline net worth it reports vs. what my net worth would be if I actually liquidated my portfolio (due to tax on capital gains). I'm curious if there's a convenient way that you've found to think about that easily (e.g., is there a tool/platform that aggregates/estimates this), or is the only real way to manually calculate your cost basis from your investment accounts?
I have not found a good tool that will "easily" maintain your cost basis information. Quicken has some of this available, but it is a royal pain to keep it in sync with reality. You need to manually adjust every single sale otherwise it goes out of whack.
I wouldn't overthink it though. That seems more of an interesting fact vs something you need to know on an ongoing basis. I don't imagine very many scenarios that involve full liquidation.
Thanks so much, really appreciate the quick reply and your thinking on this.
Great recap. I personally have remained on Excel sheets but there’s definitely a trade off in terms of it being more manual. Although that has helped make my numbers stick better in my head by doing everything by hand.
You might like tiller money. It adds the fancy aggregation powers to your spreadsheets.
I went with empower. I didn't want to pay for mint-alternative and wanted to look at all accounts/assets in a single place.
It’s a good choice!
I use spreadsheets because I have reimbursable travel expenses for my W2 & 1099s that I put on my personal card; Mint was terrible with this.
Have you found any of these tools are good at accounting for those expenses as well as not treating the reimbursements as income?
Thoughts on Copilot? It's on iOS and coming to windows as well. It's been super solid for us
I’ve heard good things but still haven’t tried it yet. What are your favorite things about it?
Super easy budgeting features. Lots of stats on trends for month over month and year over year. Full picture of your net worth. Idk, has all the typical features but it’s just really nicely executed. I stopped logging into brokerage accounts and bank accounts to check things. Copilot has become my one stop shop
Empower does not have all the credit unions. Example Virginia Credit Union the largest in the state is not included. Also they don't include all the credit card companies or mortgage companies.
Have you found other apps that support those banks? Most of them use the same handful of aggregators, with some exceptions.
Check out Neontra. Just out of beta. Similar to Monarch, but cheaper. There cashflow/forecasting is the best I've found so far.
I really want to try Monarch but I can’t help but worry a bit about the security side of things. Any thoughts on that? Feels like the stakes are somewhat high when linking accounts like this.
There are some threads on the subreddit trying to get some info on compliance eg with SOC2. No response from the team so far.
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MonarchMoney/comments/181sxxz/monarch_security_concerns/
Plaid and Finicity are the ones doing most the heavy lifting and all permissions are read only.
That coupled with having 2fac across accounts leaves me comfortable with the trade offs.
I also see a trend where more and more of the larger players are establishing direct connection types (again mostly through plaid and finicity) so you have multiple layers of compliance requirement in a space where trust is key. We are long pass the time where janky scrapers were actually logging in as you to get your data.
The security side is where I am sure plenty of the readers have a deeper level of expertise than I do. Curious your major worries?
Hey Andre! Great article. I have a couple of questions about personal capital.
1. The Savings Planner always picks up incorrect transactions as savings and I never get an accurate view of how much I save in a year from the tool. What has your experience been like ? Do you do any manual tagging or corrections ?
2. Emergency fund - This isn't a huge deal but it bothers me. The emergency fund only takes checking/savings accounts into consideration. I have a dedicated fidelity account for emergency funds and it's all in CDs. Is there a way to tag accounts as emergency funds so that it shows up correctly within PC ?
#1 seems to naturally net out correctly for me without too much intervention. It is only looking at transfers in and out for each account. So I'll have some very negative (ie transferring all my RSUs out) and others very positive (receiving the RSU transfer in) with the overall being in the right ball park. You can go through an look at all "Transfers" to see if there are items incorrectly tagged, although bulk edits are a pain.
#2 This one kills me too. It is a surprising limitation across many tools. I have a similar issue in Quicken. Monarch does allow me to classify my FIdelity cash account as a checking account or any other account type.