Let's check out Monarch Money together. This is literally my first time. Hey, it's Jon from Financial MD, welcome to today's Didactic Minute.
Now, you are actually going to get for real, no faking, although I did cut some stuff out, but this is me, actually getting into Monarch Money for the first time. So all of you Mint users, #Mintforever, ending it, you've probably heard that if you're using Mint, but for whatever reason, Intuit has decided to end it. Monarch Money is kind of picking up where that left off. There's actually a way to import your Mint stuff; I think, transactions, account, whatever – into Monarch; hopefully, pick up where you left off, but let's walk through it.
So let's open it – nice looking. First, we're going to have to create an account. I like to use Google. Here's me creating an account using my personal Google account. I'm going to be using this for my personal spending account because the vast majority of my income goes to my wife's account but I want to see how I can help track my spending; maybe pay off some debts, maybe save up my emergency fund, but this is all going to be off my personal allowance account. Who did I hear this from? A financial adviser and that is a true story. Another financial adviser that I know had recommended this for a lot of us whose clients were using Mint. So, asking some more profile questions. It's interesting that they have that – are you working with a financial professional? I'm wondering what that leads to. But, anyway, and here we are.
Here's where they get you. But, of course, nothing in life is free. This cost is pretty clearly stated. It is a 7-day trial looks like. Are we going to pay for the 7 days? Well, there are two cases where we'll continue to pay for it. One, if we think it's valuable and we want to continue to pay for it. Two, we don't think it's valuable but we forgot to cancel it and we continue to pay for it. So, I got to keep that in the back of my mind, but that's all set up and ready to go. Now I have to put in my wife's email address. I'm going to blur this out so that this hot girl doesn't get a bunch of emails from cool dudes. And here we are. In the background there, we can see the app starting to fill out but the first step, of course, is linking accounts. So I'm going to link my personal allowance account. I get $500 a month for personal spending to do whatever I want with. I might get clothes; might get coffee. I might get breakfast – any of those kinds of things – Amazon, whatnot. And all sorts of accounts we can link up. I'm going to begin first by linking a bank account because I don't have a personal credit card. That personal checking account is where I do all my spending. You can see all the typical banks you could connect with. This probably uses something like Plaid or Yodlee or some kind of account aggregation system. Going to search for my bank, found it, and looks like it's Plaid so I'm going to skip ahead here. And it's starting to sync up, pulling over transactions and expenses and income – celebration! Success!
And now we're going to see the damage. Of course, it wants to ask us if we want to be notified of these things and I do. I'm curious to see what the notifications are going to do – if it's going to help me stay in a budget; if it's going to help me save, get out of debt. And here we are. Here's my current dashboard. I'm going to dive in here a little bit and we'll see what happens.
So stay tuned for part two. We'll see if either: A., I love it and I start paying in seven days, or B., eh, not really worth it and I cancel the trial, or C., not really worth it but I don't cancel the trial and I just get charged month after month which makes me end up getting Rocket Money which supposedly is designed to help you find unwanted subscriptions and cancel them. So we're going to go down that rabbit hole, so stay tuned for part two.
This is Jon from Financial MD, we'll see you next time.