All Posts Tagged With: "personal account"
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)
Why You Should be Using a Personal Finance Tool
Tags: budget, personal finance, intuit
Paypal adds fees, and really hopes you don’t notice
Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Mon, Aug 10 2009 | 1 Comment
In June, PayPal started assessing a 2.9% fee on purchases that are marked goods or services to personal accounts. While their business is their own and they can basically do whatever they want, it would have been nice to know about the change prior to them just going for it.
There was an email saying that the Terms of Service had changed, but the email didn’t give any specifics. In order to find out exactly what happened, you would have had to go read the entire Terms of Service and familiarize yourself with the changes. I don’t know many people who read an entire terms of service document.
When you do most of your business through PayPal, then these fees really start adding up. In the past, with a personal account (versus a premium account), you wouldn’t have to pay fees to transfer funds from one PayPal account to another. however, now even if you do have the personal account, you will be charged the extra fee.
The issue doesn’t stem from the fact that PayPal decided to start charging for something that was previously free. The problem comes from the fact that PayPal was being deceptive about the entire process. It is rediculous to think that a company can just start adding fees for no reason and give no warning. Even when my credit card company decides to change something in their privacy notice, I get a letter along with an email. I mean, credit card companies typically REALLY want you to know what’s going on.
So, what was PayPal’s excuse? This is what they told Jared Newman, the guy who blogged about the changes:
“We didn’t want to make a huge formal communication out of this pricing change, because we weren’t really adding any fees, and we were hoping it would be a more useful experience for people.”
Wow.
Related posts:Bank of America says it won’t raise fees ahead of new regulations
Bank of America reduces overdraft fees: Opting out is now an option!
Things you can do to minimize your bank fees
Tags: formal communication, extra fee, credit card companies
