Intuit buys Mint then loses thousands of customers

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Tue, Sep 15 2009 | 5 Comments

Across the internet it looks like customers and users of the Mint.com are pretty irate about the buyout from Quicken software maker Intuit. Intuit has a reputation for being a not very consumer friendly software. Once upon a time Quicken was the go-to software for budgeting and personal accounting, but now it has become bloated with offers for more expensive software. Quicken also cost only $10 at one point in time and now costs somewhere around $250.

Intuit is the company that also does TurboTax and it caused quite a stink when it raised fees this year.

For these, plus a number of other, reasons customers and users of Mint.com’s budgeting software are jumping ship.

The owner of Mint says that things won’t change too much on the site and definitely will only change for the better. However, many users are taking this with a grain of salt and leaving to other programs or just going back to a simple Excel spreadsheet to manage their finances.

There are plenty of free personal finance websites on the internet that you may want to check into if you’re thinking about jumping the Mint ship.

These are 8 free programs that were suggested by the Consumerist after Mint and Intuit made the announcement:

Money Manager Ex (Windows and Linux)
MS Office templates (MS Office Suite or Open Office)
GnuCash (GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX)
Pear Budget (all platforms)
Buddi (all)
Yodlee (online)
Wesabe (online)

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Tags: budgeting software, excel spreadsheet, ms office suite

Public school cuts that students will definitely notice

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Tue, Jun 30 2009 | 0 Comments

Budget cuts in the nation’s public schools means that many states are having to find ways to limit what it spends on public schools in their budgets. I find it ironic in a way because it seems like taxes have increased at the same time that budget cuts for public education is being introduced. However, in places where homes are being appraised for much less, property taxes are much less and therefore, schools have less money to work with.

So where will your children be feeling the pinch?

Many schools will be saying goodbye to band and other music programs. At many schools, extracurricular activities like band and art clubs may be eliminated. Many curriculums are being cut down to the minimums because of teachers being laid off. This has been going on for years in many of the more rural areas of the country. At the same time, most (if not all) states have a requirement for a fine art class in high school. So, some of these classes will have to stick around.

Classes will become more crowded. In California alone 27,000 teachers have been laid off with more expected to be soon. This accounts for 15% of California’s public teacher pool. And fewer teachers means bigger classes. Many classes are having to bump up the number of kids to a class. Some classes are even going from 20 to a class to 30 to a class. This is what the San Jose Unified School District is doing and it will end up saving the district nearly $6 million for the year.

Summer programs will be, if they haven’t already been, cut. Summer programs in places where budget deficits have led to more cuts in schools, like California which is suffering from a $24 billion budget gap. Parents who usually enroll their children in some kind of public funded summer program will now have to find child care for their children. This also means cutting summer school. So when a high school senior needs that “one more credit” to graduate he or she will be out of luck.

Finally, bus services will be hurt. The number of schools that cut bus transportation routes for the 2009-2010 school year rose to 23%, up from 14% the year prior. If a school decides to cut bus routes, it can obviously save thousands of dollars (per school). However, many students (again, in more rural areas) may be finding themselves without a way to get to school. I can see where this would lead to serious truancy issues.

I think that it is important to cut money from other areas than public schools. Personally, the money should come out of anywhere else first.

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Tags: budget deficits, public education, budget

Chevron may have large drop in fourth quarter earnings

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Thu, Jan 08 2009 | 0 Comments

After months and months of spectacular earnings and record profits, Chevron expects to see a significant drop in earnings for the fourth quarter.

From Reuters:

Because market conditions had changed significantly, Chevron delayed the unveiling of 2009 capital spending plans until later this month from December. It made $15.8 billion in capital and exploratory expenditures in the first nine months of 2008, out of $22.9 billion budgeted in December 2007. -Reuters

I am not surprised to see the decline in earnings…after all, oil has tanked in the last few months. Even with its increase in the last couple of weeks, oil still won’t see the highs it saw last summer for at least a year, or until the recession starts to loosen its grip on the country.

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Tags: spending, couple, record profit