There are many people who, early into their personal finance journey, have looked for better ways to budget their monthly incomes and expenses. If you’re like me, you’ve looked around at the available tools, maybe tried some out, but they never really hit the sweet spot of what you need. They’re too basic or too expensive. There used to be a great option when Intuit’s Mint budgeting tool was around - so many great features, so much integration, very user friendly, and lots of insights and recommendations on optimizing your budget from it. Plus, it was free! I used it all the time as my primary budgeting tool.
Until Intuit shut it down.
You can tell it was a great tool by the many Reddit questions similar to “Now that Mint is gone, what are other people using?”
Since it shut down, I looked again for other tools, but none compare to what Mint was, so I went back to setting up my own budgeting tool in Google Sheets. Sad.
But here’s the thing: a lot of people early on in their journey to improve personal finances aren’t initially thinking “what new credit card should I get”. A lot of them are at the starting point: setting up a budget. If Neo could offer a good budgeting tool to attract new users early on in their personal finance journey, those users could be very easy upsells to get a new credit card. ESPECIALLY with the credit builder option available to Neo users! These are also the type of people who can have a larger long-term user impact. They may not spend much when they first become a user, but by getting users who are trying to improve, there is a higher chance of them becoming bigger spenders as their personal finances improve.
If Intuit had kept Mint, I probably would have opened other accounts and bought other Intuit products - but now that they shut it down, I avoid Intuit like the plague. I, as a user, was not worth it to Intuit in the short-term even though their budgeting app probably would have made me a higher value user in the long term.
A Neo budgeting app has very little business case in the short term, but it would be a great tool for current users, and could allow more inroads to the TAM, including higher-value long-term TAM.
For features, Mint would be a great foundation to look at. They had integrations with banks/credit cards/investment accounts to have automated spending, saving, and investing updates so that users didn’t have to manually input all the data themselves. If they bought something on their debit card or credit card, it would automatically show up in the budgeting app. If they deposited money into an investment account, it would automatically show up in the budgeting app. They also had a feature where users could create tags for different spending so as you continued to use the app, it would be more accurate in lablelling something as an expense (and what type, like restaurant or grocery") or saving, or investment. If an automate dinput was wrong, the user could go into it and flag, for example, that a purchase at Walmart was not “groceries” but home entertainment. The app would then ask “should Walmart always be considered ‘home entertainment’?”, and the user could update the automated categorization. It was fantastic.
Would anyone else be interested in an intuitive, integratable, insightful budgeting app offered by Neo?
love if Neo had a built in budget feature!!