Online Financial Management-anyone do these?

[RosieTR]

I've been hearing about Mint.com and a couple of other sites that allow one to keep track of all their personal financial management in a single place. I think they are sort of like Quicken but more automated so instead of you entering in your credit card statements and investments or whatever, the site pulls this from your various banks and accounts. NPR recently did a story on them (http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136394339/sites-that-help-track-your-spending-and-saving).

I was wondering if any of you had tried them and liked them. I did a little bit of exploring on the various websites which of course make it look really easy and secure. I was thinking it might be nice to replace our normal Excel worksheets since it incorporates tracking and figuring one's net worth; not sure any can be modified to reflect some of the other YMOYL principles (such as hours of life energy per $). On the other hand, I'm not sure I want all my bank and bill passwords on one site which could fail. Yes, they have the same security system as online banks and such but if my bank has a security breach it's not linked directly to every other financial account. Or maybe I'm not understanding it, since the bank can do transfers and bill pay maybe it really is linked to other accounts and so I've already stepped into that risk? Anyway, just wondered if anyone else has been using these or thought of it and what you think. Also if there's one you like over the others and why.

[Gizmo]

I've been hearing about Mint.com and a couple of other sites that allow one to keep track of all their personal financial management in a single place. I think they are sort of like Quicken but more automated so instead of you entering in your credit card statements and investments or whatever, the site pulls this from your various banks and accounts. NPR recently did a story on them (http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136394339/sites-that-help-track-your-spending-and-saving).

I was wondering if any of you had tried them and liked them. I did a little bit of exploring on the various websites which of course make it look really easy and secure. I was thinking it might be nice to replace our normal Excel worksheets since it incorporates tracking and figuring one's net worth; not sure any can be modified to reflect some of the other YMOYL principles (such as hours of life energy per $). On the other hand, I'm not sure I want all my bank and bill passwords on one site which could fail. Yes, they have the same security system as online banks and such but if my bank has a security breach it's not linked directly to every other financial account. Or maybe I'm not understanding it, since the bank can do transfers and bill pay maybe it really is linked to other accounts and so I've already stepped into that risk? Anyway, just wondered if anyone else has been using these or thought of it and what you think. Also if there's one you like over the others and why.

I started using Mint this month. I had a really hectic last 6 months, and hadn't been able to enter anything into GNU Cash (the Open-source version of quicken) for the entire time. I was overwelmed, and decided to just try Mint instead.

So far, I really like it. You put in your acct information for your accts, but you CANNOT initiate transfers between accounts or anything from within Mint. Mint just pulls in your transaction information for you and gives it an initial category. You can modify their categories and modify the categories it assigns to vendors. You can also split transactions into multiple categories.

For example, if I made a purchase at Safeway, Mint knows that is a grocery store and will categorize it for you as groceries. But say you buy someone a cake w/your groceries and want to categorize the cake as a 'gift' - you can open the transaction, and split it, and put the amount of the cake into your own category and leave the rest as groceries.

You can also set up 'rules' for vendors - so say, this vendor is always x and y categories with this % split, you can set that up as a rule.

You can also set up budget numbers, and it tracks your spending against your budget.

When you first log in, you see your expenses for the month so far compared to budget, and categories where you are over are colored red, yellow if you are getting close, and green if under. I also LOVE their pie chart section so you can easily see what went into the month, and then easily within 2 clicks be down in the details reviewing transactions.

[lhamo]

I use yodlee moneycenter to monitor our account balances. I still keep a separate spreadsheet for daily expenses, net worth, etc. because we use mostly cash here and so most of our spending doesn't show up as electronic transactions. I;ve been using it for almost 10 years -- it was initially offered free by our credit union, but they stopped offering it after 2-3 years. I kept my account because I was familiar with it.

If you are worried about security breaches consider the benefits on that front -- I can see my account balances on all my accounts as soon as I log in, and it is immediately obvious if there are any transactions I didn't make myself.

lhamo

[Perplexa]

I tried Mint for a while, but one of the things I didn't like was the fact that (at least a year ago) you couldn't enter your own transactions. I like to keep track of my cash spending too, and for this, I need to be able to enter expenditures. I use You Need a Budget. It's not free and won't pull automatically from your accounts, but it's still easy to download transactions to it, and they have an iPhone app that I can use when I'm on the go.

[herisf]

My family uses Mint so our mother can see her accounts (as she has dementia, we've taken over all of her finances but she still wants to see what she has). I still use Quicken for my personal stuff. Unfortunately Quicken Essentials for Mac is not as user friendly as the PC version but it's OK and does what I want it to. I enter all of my transactions as they occur, so it works well for me (and if I forget, I download from my banks).

[RosieTR]

Thanks for the advice. Llamo and Gizmo, your comments made me feel better about the potential risk...DH may still need some convincing. I think he's a little leery since he's on the PS network and had to call our CC to see what, if anything, we need to do about their security breach. At one time we did Quicken but it was kind of a PITA to enter everything through there and the downloading thing didn't work well so we went to entering stuff on Excel. Still, often it's halfway or more through the next month before we finish entering the prior month's expenses and income, and then I still have to go through and reconcile the spending with the CC statement (because something got missed when someone forgot or didn't have a pen). With that much lag time, I always feel like I'm playing catchup and not getting a good feel for whether the life energy was really worth it. The other thing that could be better is the categorization. $54.46 at Target could be clothes for work, a gift, pet supplies, household goods, entertainment or some combination of those. I'm not saying this would be totally fixed with a different system but it is more likely to if I get in the habit of checking every week rather than sometime in the next month. We don't spend much cash, and when we do it's almost always a defined situation so if the program pulls records of ATM withdrawals I can almost always put that down in one or two categories. I'm kind of thinking I'd be a lot more likely to just check if I don't have to sit down for 30+ min entering all the stuff, but want to hear what experiences others have.