Like just about everyone out there, I’m always looking to find an extra buck and I’m concerned about the financial future of my family. To that end, I decided to get a better look at my total financial picture and signed up for Mint.com. If you’re not familiar with Mint, it’s a site that allows you to securely pull in all of your account information so that you’ve got an at a glance view of your finances. This includes your credit cards, mortgages, loans, debts, etc. In concept it’s a great idea. Unfortunately, Mint.com can’t get their shit together.
A few months ago I signed up for Mint and added all of my accounts. This was a pain in the ass, but I don’t blame Mint for that… it’s the nature of the beast. Everything was going along swimmingly for a while until about 2 weeks ago. I went to login one evening to check a balance and got the following message:
“Either your username or password were incorrect.”
Hmm… that’s odd. I’m PRETTY sure that I entered everything correctly, but I suppose there’s a chance that I fat-fingered my login so I give it another try. Same response. Now if you’re like me, you’ve got about 3,000 things in your life that you need to login to ranging from your work computer to your toaster. Personally, I have about 5-6 username and password combinations that I work with, so I went through all of these in my head continuing to get the same “You’re wrong” response from the site. Even after all of this, I was giving the site the benefit of the doubt and figured that MAYBE I actually had forgotten my username and password. Highly unlikely, but technically possible. So, I used the “forgot your password” feature and received an email immediately from Mint… with absolutely nothing in it.
That’s it… no subject, no body, no instructions, no new password. How helpful is that??? So finally, I decided that it wasn’t in fact my fault and reported a bug on July 26th. Here’s the email response that I got:
Thank you so much for your email. We love hearing from you, whether you’re sharing a great testimonial or something we’d better fix. All of us are working really hard to make Mint better for you.
If you’ve asked us for an answer, we will to get back to you as soon as possible. If we’re not fast enough, please check out our support community at www.mint.com/support.event . Other Mint enthusiasts and our own customer service team are posting answers to commonly asked questions.
Also, please do not submit multiple support requests for the same exact issue. This will slow down our response time to you. Our response times are currently 18 hours.
All the best,
The Mint Customer Service Team
An obvious form letter, but I appreciated it and went to bed figuring that it’d be fixed shortly.
The next day (July 27th), I received the following “update”:
Mint.com Update
Thank you for contacting Mint.com.
Our apologies for the inconvenience. We are aware of this issue and we are actively addressing this now. Please be advised that it may take time before issues are fixed, but rest assured, our engineering are continually fixing the product bugs and functions. Sorry for the frustration this has caused.
Thank you,
Clarissa P.
Mint.com
Hey thanks Clarissa… totally appreciate your worthless response. I especially appreciate you including your time line to get it fixed. (Essentially akin to “we’ve got no idea when it’s gonna be fixed).
I’d actually forgotten all about this till about 2 nights ago when the wife and I were talking about finances again and I decided to log back into Mint.com. August 8th, I tried again, and got the EXACT… SAME… MESSAGE. What the FUCK?!?!? At this point I’m more than frustrated, so I fired off this email in response to the email that I received from Clarissa above:
Tried to login again this evening 13 days after my initial request. Still not able to. Please close my Mint.com account immediately.
Thank you.
You want to know what I got back?
Thank you for contacting Mint.com.
Our engineering team is currently working on it. We’ll inform you once we here from our engineering team and we have the resolution.
My apologies for the inconvenience.
Thank you,
Clarissa P.
Mint.com
Awesome. Talk about super customer service. Long story short stay away from Mint.com folks. I ended up going with JustThrive.com and so far, I’m VERY happy with both the interface, site speed and features (all of which I think are better than Mint.)
As of this morning (6/6/2011) I found out that Thrive is now shutting down as well. Guess I’ll have to find another solution!