I thought I made it really obvious, but I guess I’ll spell it out explicitly: @DeadlineX was making a joke, telling you to diversify into covering other things also called mint, like the finance app this comment section is concerned with.
I thought it was pretty funny. 🤷 It seems @Kazumara did as well. I was trying to keep within the context of the general thread where everyone is joking about mint being one thing or another. When the commenter before me said you should diversify, and you asked for suggestions, I thought it’d be an opportunity to suggest something else from the original thread.
The thread is about Mint, the finance app owned by intuit. I found it an amazing callback, but they can’t all be winners!
I’ve been pretty nice in this exchange. Your hostility is unnecessary. The fact is, you misread this entire thread. Everyone else understands the joke. The fact that you should be able to see that everyone else understands the joke, and yet have decided to come at me with your arms outstretched in insult should imply something to you.
It wasn’t supposed to be a hilarious joke. It was a tongue in cheek reference to the entire point of where your comment thread came from. You misinterpreted something, and a joke was made. I played off that joke. You continued to misinterpret. Maybe take a minute for introspection and think about why you felt the need to talk shit immediately instead of trying to reason things out from someone else’s point of view.
And I only used two paragraphs to explain to you a joke that was pretty self explanatory in my mind. So idk where the three came from. Again, your insults and snark are unnecessary and unappreciated.
I guess different people like different types of jokes. It’s ok for you to not like this particular joke. It’s fine to not get the joke. None of that is a big deal. So there is no need for you to get all defensive and hostile about it. Some people thought it was a good joke; but you didn’t. It’s not a big deal. Just say nothing and move on. It isn’t something worth fighting about.
Whatever happened to the free credit report.com band? I know that they didn’t get paid for any of the jingles they wrote and so they tried to sue, but I haven’t heard from them since then.
Also this is an interesting read from the original developer of Actual. Basically, it started as a closed source web app funded by a subscription model. When the business failed, he decided to open source it
Thank you for posting this. Stupid question, how do I download just to put it on my laptop? I don’t download from github a lot and I’m a little lost pulling down the exe.
I don’t think it’s offered as as an exe as it’s server-client model where you access it through a web-browser. If you want to just run it on your laptop, it can be both your server and client. The installation instructions are here, and there are also instructions for Docker on the left-side menu.
Not that I’m aware of. Unless your referring to a mobile app. They do have that for other fidelity functions but you can just access full view from a mobile web browser and it’s responsive.
YNAB is a waste of money imo. It’s literally just a spreadsheet with a bunch of mumbo jumbo to justify you paying for it while still manually doing all the work.
Except the auto-imports fuck up constantly which means you need to manually reconcile them. And they straight up discourage you from using auto imports in the first place. You’re “supposed” to reconcile all accounts manually in YNAB.
On top of that you have to make sure every transaction is categorized correctly, so there definitely is manual work to do.
Interesting that you run into those issues, I’ve had it for years and handedly had to manual reconcile more than once or twice early on, certainly not in the last few years
Pre-Intuit it was pretty decent, before banks had their own apps and before there was much competition. Once I could use my credit union’s app and it had all the usual features no more need for Mint.
These day-to-day budgeting apps with categories and stuff, it’s great when you’re spending in a similar manner or have specific goals. Once I had a mortgage and bills and stuff, I found the granularity of the information wasn’t as relevant, I kind of know what’s going on intuitively enough. Also you have a lot bigger unscheduled spending, like propane every 2-6 months which is gonna be like $1000 and seasonally dependent, yeah you can work it out per year to know you’re okay, but to have some alert that’s like “YOU WENT OVER YOUR AVERAGE ON BILLS THIS WEEK BY 300%!” is unnecessary. Similar with food, I’m gonna load up on meat and it’s gonna be like YOUR FOOD SPENDING IS OFF THE RAILS. Things like “you spent x more on gas this week” it’s like useless info, “okay I won’t buy gas and go to work then… thanks.” “You spent x more on vices,” sure, but I think people know they’re making a bad decision and it’s just a 2nd validation to “manage” the vice spending.
For useful reporting you can just export your data from your bank/cu and make your own reports. Apps that amalgamate your financial data are still useful but then you’re in to legit financial planning territory which is sort of a separate category of apps.
I just told my wife Mint was shutting down and she gasped, frozen in shock. I was thinking she was taking it really hard. Took me a minute before I realized she thought I was talking about our favorite Indian restaurant.
It's more complicated than just a spreadsheet but not as complicated as regular programming. You will want to learn general accounting practices like double entry bookkeeping to really understand how to use it though.
The main draw of Mint for me was how it pulled all transactions from all of my financial institutions. Can GnuCash do that too or is it just a FOSS alternative of QuickBooks?
I tried cludging something together with email scraping once but it relied on too many online microservices (zapier etc) and I could never really stabilize it.
I've been using Rocket Money. It has mostly the same functionality as Mint, but seems to work a lot better. It also doesn't wait 5 days to notify me of deposits like Mint does.
Have several credit cards for your categories, and use the same checking account to autopay for all. View credit card statements for breakouts and ytd expenditure for each category.
Just a heads up that the Citi custom cash card gives you 5% back on the most spent category, great for rarely boosted categories like gas or groceries.
Seems to mesh really well with your budgeting method. Limited to one per person, but if you have anyone you trust to be an authorized user you can each have one to have two such categories.
I’ve been checking YNAB out. I really like that it has an API subscribers can use.
One of my complaints is that it doesn’t seem to have rule-based categorization, but I may just write a script (or find someone else’s) that interacts with the API.
It could be that I misunderstood, but I mean something like Mint’s feature where you can have it do something like this: “Always rename ‘YRBNK PMT’ as ‘Your Bank Payment’ and categorize as Credit Card Payment”.
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