The Ultimate Budgeting App: My Top Choice After Trying the Best Mint Alternatives

Monarch Money, NerdWallet, Rocket Money, Quicken Simplifi, and YNAB were reviewed for personal finance applications. Monarch Money, priced at $99 a year, is top rated for its ease of set up and powerful tools. Mint, a free program from Intuit, was recently discontinued, leaving users searching for an alternative. Monarch Money, was rated the most full-featured personal finance application and includes an income and expense tracker, transaction tracker and data import feature. Monarch Money also includes customizable dashboard, saving goal features and support for shared budgeting making it suitable for couples or families. Other programs reviewed were NerdWallet, Rocket Money, Quicken Simplifi, and YNAB. Quicken, the old favorite personal finance program, sold by Intuit in 2016, is still around as Quicken Classic. It offers extensive financial management tools but is only available for PCs. Users can choose between different versions, including Quicken Starter, Deluxe, Premier, and Business & Personal. The price for the Starter version is $3.49 a month. It is worth noting the Quicken Starter and Classic are only available for Mac users. Users on Quicken are sure to find the most appropriate personal finance software suite for their financial requirements. I didn’t plan on spending my Thanksgiving week looking at personal finance programs, but since Intuit decided to bury Mint, its popular free money tracking and budget program I didn’t have a choice. All password protection is removed on Mint and the program is being discontinued as of January 2024. Intuit would prefer it I moved my Mint data to Credit Karma, but I’m not going to do that. While Credit Karma is good at working with your credit scores, it’s not a budgeting application. Besides, if I were to move my data to Credit Karma, I’d no longer be able to access Mint. It is important to be proactive now to switch records and data over to another service, personally needed one that would handle multiple bank and credit card accounts, several 401Ks and some stock and real estate investments. Overall, Monarch Money is the best money management program available today.