re: Replacing Mint budgeting. Need recs

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Does Monarch connect and download transactions from your banks and financial institutions (where you want it to)? Quicken did but there were a lot of duplicates and you could forget getting anything to reconcile correctly between accounts for transfers or payments unless you had a Masters in accounting to go in and fix it.

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Yes it connects and downloads all transactions. Keep in mind when you CATEGORIZE the transactions between accounts they have a section of essentially non-income/expense categories you can use so it doesnt count that transaction as an income or expense if you will. These are their "Transfer" transactions and you can categorize them however you want.

Example: I have a C.C. connected and each transaction comes through and it's an expense category I categorize those to and this shows up automatically in my budget "spent" section by category.

Once I pay the credit card, there's a debit (subtraction) from my checking account that's 1 transaction that shows up, and then a credit (Addition) transaction that shows up to the credit card account as the payment. Both of these transactions I code under the "Transfers" section so it doesnt count either as income or expense since it's not really either as I've already categorized all the individual c.c. transactions as expenses as they come through. Again you put whatever categories you want in the transfer section so I have a "credit card payment" transfer category so when i see the debit and credit transaction for a credit card payment I just select that and it will just see those transactions as transfers not income/expense.

You can even do this for things that get nutty like: I transferred money from my checking account to my brokerage account, then bought a bunch of stocks with that money. You get 2 transactions from that PLUS whatever transactions you bought stock wise it will show up. So I call the checking account to brokerage account debit/credit transaction "Transfers" and then I setup a "buy" category under transfers for when I buy stocks/ETFs/whatever in my investment account so it doesnt count ANY of those as income/expenses. so it could look something like this:

Checking account (-$1000) Category - Transfer
Brokerage account (+$1000) Category - Transfer
SCHD (-$500) Category - BUY
VOO (-$500) Category - BUY

It treats all 4 of those as transfers in that case and not income/expense.