Five Best Personal Money Management Sites
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
Five Best Personal Money Management Sites
Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.
Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.
Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.
Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)
Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.
Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)
As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.
Mint (Free)
Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.
ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)
ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.
Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)
Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.
Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.
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It’s been said that the first step to improvement is measurement. This is certainly true of personal finances. Measuring net worth is the first step to increasing net worth.
My husband and I started tracking our net worth nearly five years ago. This simple spreadsheet exercise has aided us immensely in achieving our personal finance goals these past few years. By thinking about personal finance the same way a company builds its balance sheet, it is easy to see the big picture and achieve long-term finance goals.
Just like a company balance sheet, “net worth” is calculated as “assets” minus “liabilities”. Our spreadsheet is constructed with a list of assets and debts in the first column and monthly dates across the top. Every month or two, I enter the value of each account in the corresponding column. Since my husband and I are rather geeky accountant types we also list subtotals for each of the following sections:
Assets
We start our spreadsheet by listing our assets. We start with “liquid” assets. These are assets that can be easily converted to cash. Our liquid assets include: checking and savings accounts, money market accounts, mutual funds, and individual stocks. Liquid assets could also include bond funds, bonds, Treasury bills, and savings bonds, to name just a few.
Next on the spreadsheet we list our “retirement” assets. These include our 401K and IRA accounts. We’ve been slow to roll over old employer 401K accounts, so we’ve accumulated quite a collection of accounts in this section. Eventually, we’ll do the right thing and consolidate these, but in the meantime our monthly net worth exercise has forced us to keep track of the locations and amounts in these accounts.
Following retirement assets we list “college” assets. Our two-year-old son currently has two college savings accounts listed in this section. We track a pre-paid college tuition account and a custodial account for our son in this section.
After college assets we have a section for “fixed” assets. This section includes our house, cars, and furniture. Other common fixed assets might include boats, motorcycles, coins, vacation homes, etc. The values of the cars I usually update a couple of times a year by looking up the value on Kelly Blue Book’s value calculator. This value depreciates over time based on the age, mileage, and condition of the vehicle. The value of the house I update once or twice a year with our best estimate of what the house would sell for. There are many real estate websites that can help with this valuation.
Liabilities
Now comes the “liabilities” portion of the balance sheet. Similar to a corporate balance sheet, we start with “short-term” liabilities. Our short-term liabilities include our two credit cards, our car loans, and my husband’s graduate-school loan.
Fortunately, our credit card debt is now at a level that can be paid off each month and the car loans are now non-existent, but that was not always the case. It took strong fiscal discipline and our net worth exercise to reach this stage.
Finally, we list our home loan. This is a really easy number to track since the pay-off amount comes every month with the mortgage statement. That’s it for the liabilities. Other examples of liabilities might include business loans, store lines-of-credit, and loans from other family members.
Subtracting the liabilities from the assets gives net worth. The beauty of this simple exercise is the big-picture perspective it gives to personal finance. With a little fiscal discipline, savings will increase and debt will decrease each month, giving a higher overall net worth value.
For our family, this spreadsheet has been a terrific tool in tracking investment performance and measuring our progress in paying down debt. Also, by regularly checking in on investment and credit card accounts, we’re protecting ourselves from identity theft and surprise changes in investment performance.
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