An hour of my Sundays are reserved for comings and goings of money; the weekly ritual includes a scouring of online banking, credit card, and investment websites, plus a review of my expenditures for the week. Besides the occasional curse at the bear market draining my retirement funds, the process is tedious and about as interesting as this sentence.
Imagine the wildest adventure possible with a copy of Microsoft Money, a directory of Firefox bookmarks, and a handful of receipts, bank statements, and bills. Tone down the explosions a bit and you’ve got my manual transaction machine of an evening.
I’ve been slowly moving my finances online, though, with pleasant results once I got past the fear of entrusting an unknown entity with my numbers. Research and due diligence helps alleviate some of those fears; my experience with these sites has been surreal and I’d recommend anyone looking to clarify or define their financial landscape to check out some of the free tools available online.
Billmonk is a strangely named site which tracks matters of money between people. Input a dinner or grocery bill, and the site will keep a running tab for those times when an IOU on the forehead is unfashionable. It works great at our apartment as an alternative to my painful manual calculations of Costco trips and verbs better than Zeon’s handy debt Excel preadsheet. (e.g., “I’ll pay and Billmonk it” over “I’ll pay and Zeon it”)
One sore point with the site is its insistence on tying every identity to an e-mail; when users record a debt they send a notice to the other party in the name of “full disclosure” and viral marketing, so the service works best between established Billmonk users. Your identity on the site is no more than an e-mail, so privacy concerns are minimal unless you fancy tagging your transactions with exotic metaphors. (essentially “sex” for everything)
Wesabe is a money management tool I used briefly. It works like Quicken or Microsoft Money lite, tracking personal finances in the form of bank and credit card accounts. They have two selling points: your financial data is stored on your machine and uploaded when the site is accessed, and users exchange tips through a simple social network based on geographic location.
The local data storage is a nice touch if a bit buggy, but Wesabe’s social network doesn’t entice the fiscally responsible user. Most of the advice would be valuable if you were truly mired in credit card debt, a soon-to-default mortgage, and had just decided to run away to Latin America; most of the people I can think of who’d ever consider Wesabe already know the good habits of money management and would be better off lecturing clueless friends on Facebook.
Actually, a Facebook financial app would be a great idea.
Finally, Yodlee MoneyCenter is a money manager – in the same vein as Wesabe – with a powerful set of tools for hands off finances. Their strength lies in the ability to sync data with thousands of financial institutions’ websites: banks, investment firms, credit card companies, retirement funds, etc. A dashboard displays your “net worth” (a sobering figure for, uh, some), charts show how you spend, and links allow you to go any of the sites synced; it’s a portal to your online finances which automates all the trivial stuff.
Privacy is an obvious concern, especially since you’re providing your account numbers and your username/passwords. To their credit, their main business is running similar services for other banks and firms (Bank of America’s My Portfolio is one), and they’ve been around since the 90′s, so they don’t seem to be a fly-by-night shop looking to mine financial information and steal identities.
I guess my one gripe with Yodlee would be that it doesn’t look very sexy, especially compared to some of the recent startups like Wesabe and Mint. (incidentally, Mint uses Yodlee as its backend too) I’ve lost some of the charting and reporting power of Microsoft Money as well as the scrutiny of reviewing each receipt, but I am more efficient and with Yodlee’s great categorization tools probably more accurate too.
If you’ve ever wondered why your account suddenly feels $500 lighter, it may be the time to (let someone else) organize your finances.
[...] Netvibes free me from checking sites manually, auto-backups relieve me of copying files myself, Yodlee MoneyCenter lets me throw away most of my receipts, and I of course no longer write my own blog software. I [...]