Somewhere on your phone there's a budgeting app. It knows what you spent at the grocery store on Tuesday. Somewhere else — a browser tab, a planner subscription, maybe a spreadsheet you built in 2019 — there's a retirement plan. It knows what you hope your life looks like in 2055.
They have never spoken to each other.
This is the two-app problem, and if you have it, you're not doing anything wrong. The market built it this way. When Intuit shut down Mint in early 2024, millions of people scattered to replacements, and the replacements split cleanly into two camps: apps for today's money and apps for future money. Almost nothing handles both.
Let's look at what each camp actually does, what the split costs you, and what a single app would need to do to replace the pair.
Camp one: the daily-money apps
YNAB and Monarch Money are the big names here, and both are good at what they do.
YNAB is built around envelope budgeting — every dollar gets a job the moment it arrives. It's opinionated, it has a devoted community, and for people who click with the method, it changes behavior like nothing else. It costs $14.99 a month or $109 a year as of this writing.
Monarch is the closest thing to a Mint successor: clean account aggregation, flexible budgets, shared access for couples, good reports. The Core plan runs $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, with a Plus tier at $199.
Here's what neither can tell you: whether you can retire at 58. Whether a Roth conversion this December saves you five figures over your lifetime. What happens to your plan if you take Social Security at 62 instead of 70. These apps see backward and sideways — transactions, categories, this month versus last. They don't model your next thirty years, and they don't model taxes.
Camp two: the future-money planners
Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) and ProjectionLab own this side.
Boldin's PlannerPlus is a serious retirement modeling tool — scenarios, Roth conversion explorer, Social Security timing. It's $144 a year after a 14-day trial.
ProjectionLab is a favorite in the FIRE community for good reason: elegant lifetime projections, Monte Carlo simulation, historical backtesting. Premium is $129 a year. But it's deliberate about what it isn't. It doesn't connect to your bank accounts — you type your numbers in by hand — and its own positioning is plain: it's a planner, not a budgeting app.
So the planners have the opposite blind spot. They can see 2055 in vivid detail, but they can't see Tuesday. Your actual spending, the single most important input to any retirement projection, arrives only when you remember to type it in.
What the split costs
Start with the subscriptions. A common stack — YNAB for budgeting, Boldin for planning — runs $253 a year at current list prices. Monarch plus ProjectionLab comes to about $229. Call it $230 to $250 a year for the pair, every year.
That's the visible cost. The invisible one is worse.
Your retirement plan is only as good as the spending number you feed it. Most people guess. They open the planner, hit the annual-spending field, and type something optimistic — then their budgeting app quietly records reality, and nobody reconciles the two. A projection built on spending that's off by $800 a month is off by hundreds of thousands of dollars over a retirement. The error compounds silently for decades.
And plans go stale. Updating a manual planner is a chore, so it happens twice a year, then once, then the tab stays closed. The budget app stays current because it syncs itself. The plan — the thing that actually answers "am I going to be okay?" — drifts further from the truth every month.
What one app would need to do
If you want to collapse the stack, the replacement has to clear a real bar on both sides, not just gesture at each. A fair checklist:
Daily money. Bank and brokerage sync, so the data arrives on its own. Budgets with real granularity — annual budgets broken into months, with budget-versus-actuals you'd actually read. Reports that answer where the money went. Some way to catch subscriptions and cash-flow shortfalls before they bite.
Future money. A lifetime forecast, not a retirement-age gauge — the actual year-by-year path of your money, ideally to the day it runs out. What-if scenarios and Monte Carlo simulation, because a single average-case line is a guess wearing a suit. And couples handled honestly: two life expectancies, two runways, not one blended person.
Taxes, seriously. This is where most tools quietly fold. Federal and state brackets, FICA, RMD ages under SECURE 2.0, Roth conversion math, Social Security taxation. A forecast that ignores taxes isn't conservative or optimistic — it's fiction.
The connection between the two. This is the whole point. Your real, synced spending should be the input to your forecast, automatically. When your grocery bill creeps up 12%, your runway should move. That feedback loop is the thing no two-app stack can give you, at any price, because the apps don't share data.
The switching cost is lower than it looks
The biggest reason people keep a stack they've outgrown is history. Years of categorized transactions feel like sunk treasure, and retyping a retirement plan sounds like a lost weekend.
Two things shrink that cost. First, most modern tools import from their competitors — if a candidate app can pull your Monarch or YNAB export, or read a CSV or a Tiller spreadsheet, your history comes with you. Ask before you assume it can't. Second, you don't have to switch cold. Run the new app alongside your current stack for one full billing month. Let it sync, let it categorize, and compare its forecast against the plan in your old tool. Thirty days of parallel running tells you more than any review — including this one — ever could. If the single app can't match the pair, you've lost nothing but a trial period.
Where Tally sits
Full disclosure: this is Tally's blog, and this problem is why Tally exists. Tally connects your accounts (2,000+ institutions via Plaid, plus brokerage sync and spreadsheet imports), runs annual budgets with monthly budget-versus-actuals, and feeds all of it into a lifetime, tax-aware forecast — federal and all 50 states — with what-if scenarios and Monte Carlo simulation, including per-partner runways for couples. One app, $79 a year, against $230 to $250 for the typical pair.
When two apps still make sense
Honesty requires this section. If YNAB's envelope method is the thing keeping your spending in check, that method is worth more than the subscription overlap — keep it. If you refuse to link bank accounts anywhere on principle, ProjectionLab's manual-entry philosophy is a feature, not a bug. And if your situation involves a business, equity compensation, or an estate plan with moving parts, software of any kind is a supplement to a human advisor, not a replacement.
But if you're paying for two apps because that's just how the market shook out after Mint died — and your retirement plan hasn't been updated since spring — the split isn't serving you. It's costing you twice: once in subscriptions, and once in a forecast that no longer knows what you actually spend.
Your money is one thing. Tuesday's groceries and 2055's runway are the same dollars at different points on one timeline. The tools should treat them that way.
Prices are list prices as of August 2026 and may change; check each vendor's site for current rates.
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