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The Phantom Mint

mrgan:

On September 14, 2009, Intuit announced that it would purchase Mint.com, a personal-finance tool with a great reputation among its users. Not having much faith in Intuit, I cancelled my Mint account promptly. Whenever I cancel any service like this, I attempt to log back in, just to make sure I’m really out; Mint wouldn’t let me back in. And, I got a confirmation email.

Class act so far. Then yesterday, I got an SMS alert warning me about my budget. It took me a second to understand what this was.

Holy crap, I thought. Not only am I still a Mint user, they’re still checking my accounts.

I tried logging in again. No problem! My bank accounts were still in and up to date. So I deleted my account… again.

Some observations:

1. It’s funny to blame Intuit for this, but it sure looks like a pre-Intuit Mint bug.
2. And I do believe it’s a bug, not a deliberate policy of never actually deleting accounts, because that would be completely insane.
3. Many of you will laugh at me for ever giving a company like Mint my financial info. Mint provided a useful and convenient service for me; unless you live totally off the grid, we’re just debating how much personal info to trade for what functionality.
4. I have since switched to Yodlee MoneyCenter; it’s similar to Mint, except dorkier.

That’s terrible! Try using Geezeo.com. Great tool and we definitely delete your data if you delete your account. ;)