Friday, December 12, 2008

online money managers

This past month I started tracking all my expenses online, partly because we've hired a financial planner and she keeps asking how we spend our money. (Rude, I know.)

I started with Mint.com (because a vendor of my employer recommended them), and I'm very happy with their service. They:
  • They import from all my accounts (so far).
  • They categorize each expense automatically (and they're usually correct).
  • I can change the categorizations, and save the preference so that future expenses with the same description are categorized the same way.
  • I can split expenses and categorize parts separately.
I only have two complaints so far:
  • I cannot manage my cash.
  • While I can add my own categories, I cannot change or remove the predefined ones.
Coincidentally, today I found two other services that do much the same thing. I won't be switching yet, but I'll be watching for mothers:
  • Wesabe.com is very interesting because they want to make it a community that gives suggestions to one another; in addition, they have some APIs to help you work with your account data... they just want to make it really easy to analyze your finances and get help managing them. The current show-stoppers: they require a Mac or Windows install, so I cannot manage things from whatever computer I'm on; they currently only work with "USAA, Citibank, Chase, Wachovia, CapitalOne, and Bank of America"; and their APIs don't yet aggregate account data.
  • Egg.com seems to offer services similar to Mint, plus in-house financial services like loans, savings accounts, etc. The current show-stopper: it requires a Windows ActiveX install.

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