Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
Is Intuit smothering Mint?
"What happened to Mint?" asked Rob Pegoraro at Fast Company. The once groundbreaking personal-finance service is exhibiting "severe symptoms of neglect." Mint aggregates transaction data to show you "where your money comes and goes," but as its founder, Aaron Patzer, says, "it could be doing much more." Patzer sold Mint to Microsoft's Intuit in 2009, thinking Mint would eventually sync with TurboTax. A decade later, that has not happened, so transferring Mint's data to TurboTax is still "a laborious ordeal." Mint's investments page, which should allow you to easily monitor your portfolio, "has spent years apologizing to me for needing Adobe's vulnerability-riddled Flash plug-in" to simply view stock performance graphs. It also "mischaracterizes too many transactions" and has not made any updates to its features since April 2019.
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Uber tests letting drivers set prices
Uber is experimenting with a program in California that allows certain drivers to set their own fares, said Amrita Khalid at Qz. The move is a response to the state's new AB5 gig economy law, and the change is designed to help Uber make the case that it's a tech platform, not an "employer" subject to California's new rules. Only Uber drivers serving the airports will be able to set their own price, "up to a maximum of five times that of Uber's base price"; the program will also let drivers charge lower fares, opting out of Uber's surge pricing in periods of high demand. Critics think drivers ultimately won't benefit much from this newfound autonomy. "Since jobs go to the lowest bidder, some believe drivers will end up earning far less that they did."
New credit scores may hurt debtors
Your credit score may be about to change, said AnnaMaria Andriotis at The Wall Street Journal. Fair Isaac, the company responsible for the three-digit FICO score, announced a new model that will score consumers with rising debt levels more harshly. FICO 10 will assess debt levels over a period of two years, rather than just the previous month. People whose credit cards stay close to the limit for a sustained period of time could see their scores drop. Unsecured debt from riskier personal loans will also be flagged. Those with already high scores could see a bump up on their credit reports. However, not right away: FICO introduced its latest revision, FICO 9, in 2014, and most lenders are still on earlier versions.
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