Mint Alternative: Budgeting in a Spreadsheet You Own

The most durable Mint alternative is a spreadsheet you own. Mint closed on 23 March 2024, and the history that lived on Intuit's servers went with it unless you downloaded a CSV. A Google Sheet with Date, Amount, Category and Note columns, a monthly summary and your old Mint export imported gives you a budget that no company can switch off.

This guide covers what Mint did, the options people moved to, how to build a mint alternative spreadsheet in Google Sheets, and how to bring old Mint CSVs into it.

What Mint did, and why it closed

Mint launched in 2007 and was bought by Intuit in 2009. For most of its life it did three things well, for free:

• Pulled in transactions from your bank and card accounts automatically.
• Sorted them into categories, so you could see where money went each month.
• Set monthly budgets by category and warned you when you went over.

In November 2023 Intuit announced Mint would close and that users should move to Credit Karma, another Intuit product. The end date was first set for 1 January 2024 and then pushed back to 23 March 2024.

Credit Karma focuses on credit scores, net worth and spending insights. At the time of the switch, reviewers noted it didn't let you set monthly category budgets, which was the feature many Mint users relied on most. That gap sent a lot of people looking elsewhere.

The bigger lesson is about ownership. Years of categorised transactions lived inside a service you didn't control. When the service ended, the only copy you kept was whatever you had exported yourself.

Mint alternatives: the options since 2024

Former Mint users have mostly gone one of four ways. Here's how they compare on the things Mint did:

To be fair to the apps: if you want every card transaction to appear without lifting a finger, a linked app does that better than any spreadsheet you type into. Mint's automatic import was its real strength, and manual entry doesn't replace it.

What linked apps can't offer is permanence. Each one is a company that can raise prices, change features or close, as Mint did. If you use one, export your data regularly. We compare the app route in more depth in our upcoming spreadsheet vs budgeting app guide, and look at apps that skip bank linking in our upcoming roundup of budget apps that don't connect to your bank.

If linking is the part that worries you, what is Plaid? explains what the aggregator behind most "Connect your bank" buttons collects and keeps.

Why a spreadsheet makes a good Mint alternative

A Google Sheet isn't an app with a business model. It's a file. You can download it as Excel or CSV at any time, open it in other software, and keep it for as long as you like. That's what makes a mint alternative spreadsheet hold up over the years:

• It can't be discontinued out from under you. The file format outlives any single budgeting company.
• Your history stays in one place. Ten years of rows sit in the same sheet you add to today.
• You decide the categories. No fixed list and no recategorising things you didn't choose.
• No bank login. Nothing to link, so nothing to revoke later. Our guide to tracking expenses without linking your bank covers that trade-off in full.

The cost is that you record each purchase yourself. For most people that's a few seconds per purchase, and it tends to make you more aware of spending than a feed you skim once a month. It also catches cash, which bank feeds miss.

How to build a Mint-style budget in Google Sheets

You can rebuild the parts of Mint that matter in about 20 minutes:

1. Create a Transactions tab with these columns: Date, Amount, Category, Account, Note. Add Type (Expense or Income) if you want income in the same list.
2. Add a category dropdown. Select the Category column, choose Data > Data validation and point it at a short list of categories. Keep it under 15; Mint's long list is part of why people stopped checking it.
3. Create a Budget tab with one row per category and a Budget column for this month's limit.
4. Total each category for the month. Next to each budget, add a Spent column with a SUMIFS that matches the category and the month's date range. Our guide to SUMIFS by month has the exact formulas.
5. Add Left = Budget − Spent, and use conditional formatting to turn the cell red below zero. That's Mint's over-budget warning.
6. Chart it. Insert a bar chart of Spent vs Budget by category to get Mint's monthly overview.

If you'd rather not build it from scratch, our free Google Sheets expense tracker template has these tabs ready, and the full walkthrough is in how to track expenses in Google Sheets.

How to import old Mint CSVs into Google Sheets

If you downloaded your transactions before March 2024, look for a file named transactions.csv. Its columns are Date, Description, Original Description, Amount, Transaction Type, Category, Account Name, Labels and Notes.

1. Import the file

1. In your budget spreadsheet, open File > Settings and set Locale to United States. Mint dates are month-first (for example 3/14/2023), and other locales can misread them.
2. Choose File > Import > Upload, pick the Mint CSV and select Insert new sheet(s).
3. Rename the new tab Mint history. Keep it as a raw copy and do your clean-up in columns next to it.

2. Fix the amounts

Mint exports every amount as a positive number and records the direction in Transaction Type ("debit" for money out, "credit" for money in). Add a column called Signed amount:

=IF(E2="debit", -D2, D2)

Fill it down. Spending is now negative and income positive, so totals add up correctly.

3. Remove transfers

Mint counted credit card payments and moves between your own accounts as transactions. Filter the Category column for Transfer and Credit Card Payment and delete those rows, or they'll double-count your spending.

4. Map Mint's categories to yours

Make a small two-column table on a Category map tab: Mint's category on the left, your category on the right (for example, "Fast Food" and "Restaurants" both map to "Eating out"). Then add a My category column to the history tab:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(F2, 'Category map'!A:B, 2, FALSE), "Uncategorised")

Sort by My category to find anything you missed, and add it to the map.

5. Join it to your current tracker

Copy Date, Signed amount, My category, Account Name and Description into your Transactions tab under the matching columns, using Paste special > Values only. Your Mint years and your new entries now sit in one list, and the same SUMIFS formulas cover both.

One caution: some users have reported that Mint's export stopped at 10,000 transactions. If your file ends with exactly 10,000 rows, part of your history may be missing.

Keeping the spreadsheet up to date without a bank feed

The hard part of any spreadsheet budget isn't the formulas. It's adding purchases on a phone, where typing into a tiny grid is slow enough that people give up.

Voice Sheet is built for that step. It has no bank linking and saves each entry as a row in your own Google Sheet. The free plan gives you forms built from your sheet's columns, templates and a budget dashboard. With Premium you can say "groceries, forty-two dollars, Costco" and it fills in the Date, Amount, Category and Note columns. Pricing lists what's free and what's in Premium. It doesn't import bank transactions or scan receipts, so you're still the one recording each purchase, just faster.

The short version

Mint showed how useful a categorised view of your spending can be, and its closure showed the risk of keeping that view in someone else's app.

• Mint closed on 23 March 2024; Intuit pointed users to Credit Karma, which lacked Mint-style budgets.
• Linked budgeting apps beat spreadsheets on automatic imports, but any of them could close or change.
• A Google Sheet with transactions, a budget tab and SUMIFS formulas covers what most people used Mint for.
• Old Mint CSVs import cleanly once you fix the amount signs, remove transfers and map categories.
• Manual or voice entry keeps it current without linking your bank.