Mvelopes Personal

I would have to agree with other readers. The customer support is very poor. Their attitude is usually OK but frequently they don't understand the problem and often don't fix it but close the trouble ticket anyway. The problem just comes back. Almost all serious problems i've had are with downloading transactions. Mvelopes often fails to download transactions and errors out. Later in the day if I try it again it may work or it may be permanently broken.
As far as I have researched there is no other product budgeting product that uses this envelopes budgeting concept so Mvelopes has the market for it. Once there is competition i believe either mvelopes will start making a quality product or people will drop it. Until then it is worth the hassle of errors to be able to use it.

First let me say I love the Mvelopes philosophy, it's a fantastic way to manage your money. You look in the envelope to see how much money you have to spend on any item or category. If you don't have the money, you don't buy it! Seriously, it's so simple but such a life impacting principle. It's put you in control! There are however two downsides, the one that is relatively minor in my book is that the application is built using yester-years technology. But again that's minor because it does work. Here's the biggest problem with Mvelopes, their customer support and customer appreciation. Support is ONLY available via online chat which is a big drawback, second the customer support reps are a) not very friendly b) not very knowledgeable and c) are not interested in retaining you as a customer AT ALL! My wife and I had a lot of problems with mvelopes connecting to our bank, we constantly have to use the online chat to have them reset passwords, check the connections, etc. Pretty frustrating. I finally got tired of it and cancelled the account altogether.

Meanwhile that problem with the bank connection seemed to stabilize and my wife was becoming pretty happy with how it was working. I had decided when it came renewal time I would go ahead and pay for another years subscription. Time went by and one day my wife could not login to the system. She called and they told her that they were deleting the account, she asked of we could renew and just continue using the system. They told her no! They would let us start a new subscription, but they were going to delete our account anyway and we would have to start from scratch! I asked to talk to a manager and the csr said that “the manager will tell you the same thing”, I told her I wanted to talk to a manager anyway. She said I would have to schedule a time to have them call and it takes at least one business day for them to call. Unreal! It’s obviously an offshore support team and it would seem they don’t have a full time manager….
Bottom line, Mvelopes is cool and it will save you from unorganized financial stress, e.g. save you Money! But the company has some serious problems with customer support, so if you have a problem cross your fingers, click the “chat support” button and hope for the best. Meanwhile you might want to look into Mint.com, it’s free and uses current technology. And even though it’s free it has worked flawlessly where Mvelopes is still somewhat buggy. Have fun !

Customer Service via IM is not customer service. A person was scheduled to call at a specific time and never did. Very difficult to get help. Don't buy product.