How to Export Your Mint Data and Start Fresh

When Mint shut down they gave users a window to export your history as a CSV. If you did it, you have date, description, amount, category, account - years of data. If you didn't... it's gone. That window closed.

I exported mine. Used it mostly to check annual averages before setting up somewhere new. The CSV opens fine in Google Sheets. Most apps won't import it directly so it's more of a reference document than something you actually migrate.

Starting fresh was kind of easier than I expected honestly. I thought I'd miss having 4 years of history to compare against. I don't really. Month to month comparison is enough for what I actually want to know.

For picking what to switch to - I genuinely didn't have a good system for this. I just tried things. YNAB was too structured for how I think about money. Monarch I liked but didn't want to pay monthly. Tried a couple others I forget the names of.

Ended up on DrakeAI which is a bit of a weird choice because it's manual entry, no bank sync. I was skeptical about that going in. It's been fine though - entry is fast enough that it doesn't feel like a chore, and I'm actually capturing cash transactions that never showed up in Mint. The CSV export from Mint is sitting in a folder somewhere that I've looked at maybe twice.

I think the honest advice is just pick something and use it for a full month before deciding it doesn't work. I gave up on apps too quickly in the first few weeks because nothing felt exactly like Mint. Nothing will. Mint's gone.