Useful Financial Tools online

There have been a couple of pretty good websites which have helped me clean up my finances. Just wanted to share it with others, incase they aren't aware of them already.

1) Mint.com (http://www.mint.com/)

It is free, of course.

This website is an excellent example of clean usage of Web 2.0 technologies. It is primarily designed as a one-stop-shop for all your bank accounts, loan accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts, 401(K) etc. It requires a one-time setup and after that, it refreshes the data automatically from all of them everytime you login.

The beauty of this website is its simplicity and self-explanatory menu options. It gives me a holistic view of my finances. The first time you set it up, it downloads a certain amount of existing financial data (depending on how much the respective institution allows it to) and as you go forward, it keeps tabs on them. It gives you the ability to categorize them easily and once you name say "Shoprite" as "Grocery", it does the labeling automatically from that point onwards - no need to "create" a filter or any circus like that. It has its own dictionary too, so it does a decent job of labeling by itself.

These labels are central to the usability of this website. It provides nice pie-charts to show your spending trends. It compares your category-wise expenses to US Average and so on. You can create your own budget and monitor how you are sticking to it. I used to visit multiple websites - american express, chase, bank of america, etrade and so on, this saves a bunch of time on all that. It could also sync up with my car-loan account, which was pretty cool.

Another useful aspect is the alerts part. It will alert you if any payment is coming up - you can set your alerts as you wish. It helps prevent missed payments. It shows up all hidden fees charged by your bank that might escape your attention. If there has been any anomalous charge or spending trend, it shows that up too - but more often than not, I find this type of alert a bit too silly (it is comparing it to my limited history, so it gives false alarms at times).

It shows up the "Net worth" which is a useful feature - showing us where we really stand on the balance sheet. Its fun to explore this website. It can provide you with saving techniques by suggesting some credit cards with good points / cash-back feature, savings accounts with better interest rates etc. - but I guess this is the part where they make their money through "suggestions", so I'll read it with a grain of salt.


2) Buxfer (http://www.buxfer.com/)

Another great website, helps me track shared expenses. This used to be a big pain, if you frequently share expenditure with say your room-mate, colleagues at work etc. This website lets you stream-line them and you can easily add/delete/modify/settle expenses.

The person you are sharing expenses with needs to create an account too, but its hardly a stumbling block. When I was in Minneapolis, we used this website called "Buddy Bills" (http://www.buddybills.com/), but it wasn't as user friendly as this. Balances carried across months used to be a bit problematic to resolve etc etc. I'm not sure if they fixed that. But buxfer has proved to be a great solution. My colleagues at work use it. They used to manage expenses with an excel sheet. Luckily for me, my friend Neela suggested this website as a replacement to buddy bills and we haven't looked back since.

Try it out! And yes, its free too :)