I’m glad that I’m not the only one who tried to cancel my Mint account, only to find that it kept going on without me.
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:
- It’s funny to blame Intuit for this, but it sure looks like a pre-Intuit Mint bug.
- And I do believe it’s a bug, not a deliberate policy of never actually deleting accounts, because that would be completely insane.
- 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.
- I have since switched to Yodlee MoneyCenter; it’s similar to Mint, except dorkier.
