Mint shut down — here's exactly what to do next

Intuit acquired Credit Karma in late 2020 for around $7.1 billion. Mint had been free for users since Intuit bought it in 2009 — monetized by ads and credit card referrals — but it overlapped heavily with Credit Karma's product. Intuit announced Mint's retirement in late 2023 and shut it down for new users immediately, with existing users migrated to Credit Karma through March 23, 2024. Credit Karma retained Mint's credit-monitoring and net-worth tracking but didn't carry over the dedicated budgeting tools that defined Mint. The takeaway: a free app run by a big company exists at the company's discretion. When the business case shifts, the app goes. Worth remembering when picking the replacement.

Not from Intuit. The export window closed in March 2024. If you exported your transaction history to CSV before then, you have it; if not, the data is gone for budgeting purposes (Intuit kept account-credit data inside Credit Karma but not your category-level transaction history). For practical purposes, treat Mint history as lost and rebuild forward. Pull 30-90 days of CSV statements from your bank and credit card portals — those still work, take five minutes per account, and give you enough recent data to spot patterns. Most ex-Mint users overestimate how often they actually looked at historical charts. The valuable thing was the daily/weekly habit, not the multi-year archive.

Yes, if you were actively budgeting with Mint. Even one or two months without tracking causes drift — recurring subscriptions stack up, dining out creeps higher, savings transfers get skipped. The behavioral research on budgeting consistency suggests that gaps over two weeks tend to break the habit entirely; people don't re-pick-up after that. The faster you get a new tracker in place, the less rebuilding you'll do. Don't aim for the perfect app on day one. Pick something usable this week and switch later if needed. Cash Compass takes five minutes to set up free, and you can always migrate to a heavier app like YNAB later if you decide you want the strict zero-based system.

Three steps, about an hour total. (1) List your monthly bills and their due dates — rent, utilities, subscriptions, minimum debt payments. (2) Pick 6-10 spending categories (groceries, dining, gas, fun, savings, clothing, other is a fine starting set). (3) Install the new app and log your last three to seven days of transactions manually. That's enough to see how the app feels. After a week of consistent logging, you'll know whether the app fits or whether to try a different one. Cash Compass setup is fastest because there's no bank connection step — install, pick categories, log. Copilot or Monarch take longer because of the OAuth flow with each bank, plus initial category cleanup of the auto-imported transactions.