I was a long-time Mint enthusiast. Mint saved me from the money woes of Quicken almost a decade ago. It was my trusty friend as my husband and I paid off our mortgage in less than 2 years. It helped me adjust quickly to the financial realities of moving to a very expensive city.

But something happened along the way from paying off our mortgage to today: Mint allowed me to check out a little bit. It would only require a few expense re-categorizations here and there. It was taking over all of the management work for me so that I wouldn’t have to. Amazing right? Maybe not.

These days, we have much bigger, more long-term goals, like early financial independence, and as a result, we’ve become a little more lax in keeping a strict spending plan. It’s become very easy to let the money we’d normally set aside for the long-term get eaten up, literally, in restaurants.…