Comments on: Online Personal Finance Analysis Tools: Some Thoughts on Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:16:03 +0000

I just wanted to say that I use Quicken Online and I do not pay a thing for it. I also find it very useful!

By: Harei

Harei — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:22:28 +0000

About two month ago I decided that I need to start using my own personal budgeting in order to gain the kind of control I want to have over my cash. With recent stories about cool new web2 free utilities like Remember The Milk I started searching for a good online personal budgeting utility and I was surprised to not find what I wanted after a good week of searching. Truth is the web is full of personal financing and personal budgeting and personal money management services and solutions, like Mint (reviewed here), but they are all offering extras that I am not looking for.

I am not looking for online transaction services or hookups to my online bank accounts, or stock trading, and you name it, I am looking for a simple personal budgeting online utility that does only budgeting and does it well, fast and easy. I just about gave up when I mention my quest to a friend, and the next day he got back to me and said that he was mentioning my comment to another friend who then told him about this cool new little online free personal budgeting utility.

So I went and checked it out and could not believe my eyes, exactly what I was looking for. No frills, no gimmicks, no “kitchen sink” endless features that I don’t want, and no requirements to hookup to my online bank accounts, just simple, fast and easy personal financing and it’s free and it’s totally anonymous. I have used it for over a month now and it works like a charm for me. It’s called “Out Of The Dark” and is available at:

http://www.myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php

If all you want is a functional, simple and safe online personal budgeting, you may want to check this one out.

Enjoy,
Harei

By: Marynell

Marynell — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:57:34 +0000

Quickenonline does not support their customers at all. My bank account was updated and kept current, within Quickenonline, up to a point. Then there was some hiccup with the update process, which they have refused to address. My bank account now is not updated at all, making their service totally un-usable. I have requested help four times and left numerous feedback, and they have ignored them all.
I was running Mvelopes at the same time, for comparison. Mvelopes had the same hiccup with updating, and at the same time; but they cleared it up right away, and my accounts are all current with them.
Quickenonline’s lack of service is very disappointing.

By: mala

mala — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:10:16 +0000

I use BudgetPulse.com. The website is simple to use and no need to provide your banking details.Apart from tracking expenses, assets and bills against income, it helps to build an ideal budget by laying down millstones in expenses above regular intervals of time.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 07:20:04 +0000

I had security concerns about these websites but thought I’d give Mint a try by entering information from a seldom used credit card. Lo and behold, two weeks later I had an unauthorized charge on that account. No sooner had I gotten that taken care of with my credit card company did I receive a call from them saying that I had four unusual transactions (posting to a foreign country) within two days! Needless to say, that card has been cancelled and I will not be using any online financial analysis tools again. It’s more laborious, but I will only be using You Need a Budget and desktop Quicken from now on.

By: K12Linux

K12Linux — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:57:11 +0000

My biggest security worry with these is the fact that they have aggregate stores of information. I use Linux on my home PC and that’s where I do my book keeping. For a hacker it has a low effort/reward ratio. The effort required to hack into my system vs the reward (a single household’s financial and personal info) makes me a poor target.

Even if they have really great security and hacking them is hard they are still better targets. The reward of hacking a service with tens or hundreds of thousands of households worth of information makes it worth the effort.

Sure they are trusted by banks and other institutions and they obviously know how big of a target they are. So it’s easy to assume that means they have bullet-proof security. That logic will fail you more often than you might believe. There have been some HUGE data losses from companies. Including a recent one just a couple of weeks ago where personal information of 650,000 people was lost including over 150,000 social security numbers.

We see web 2.0 security flaws almost constantly in security news making Mint even more frightening to me.

By: web design

web design — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:42:19 +0000

I use Quicken Desktop and love it’s ease of use. Feature rich and ad free… it blows mint and wesabe away!

By: Sunbee

Sunbee — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:22:59 +0000

My husband works in networking and computer security. He will not have us doing any banking on line. When we did stuff on ebay for a while, we opened a seperate bank account that we used only for PayPal. The more places your data is, the more likely it is to be compromised, and in a lot of situations, it isn’t the security protocals on the network that are the problem, it’s the people using it, and even if you know what you ought and ought not do, it’s easy to mess up.
For example, our state has an immunization database. We refuse to participate, and this is why: when you go into the health department to get your vaccines, here (very rural area), you can see the monitor of the gal at the front desk as she calls up people’s information. So I’m sitting there reading a magazine and waiting for us to be called, and I could be writing down names, SSNs, birthdates, off her screen. Anyone in that waiting area could.
Ever check your bank information while in the coffee shop? (Unsecured network and who knows who might glance over your shoulder.) Worse yet, how about on your work computer? Your employers and their computer technicians have access and do and will, and you probably have a statement to that effect somewhere in your employee manual. There’s even a device that can be used to read data from your screen off your monitor’s radiation from outside your building, although now we’re talking significant cost and effort, and not particularly likely for use by data thieves. Very useful for law enforcement, though.

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:40:51 +0000

I’ve used Mvelopes (www.mvelopes.com) for well over a year. While the functionality is great and it helps me keep track of where my money should go (and where it went), the monthly fee is a turn off. If you don’t sign up for the long term, it’s $13.20/ month. Even with the 1 year plan, $129.60/year is a little steep for software. I think I’m going to give Mint a try – just to see how ‘good’ I have it with Mvelopes (if i have it good at all…)

By: SRV

SRV — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:41:14 +0000

I have used Mint for couple of months or so … I liked most (if not all) of the features offerred. But I too was concerned about the security aspect, and hence deleted my accounts (I had only added my credit card accounts). Trent: do you know if my credit card details are still on their servers even after I deleted my accounts? Thanks in advance!

@ N:
I believe if someone got a hold of your credit card details (number and expiry dates), they can use just these details to make online purchases, without needing your name and SSN. Correct me if I am wrong.

Regards,

SRV

By: Mike Maven

Mike Maven — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:22:41 +0000

I like the way that Mint can give me a quick overview of my situation. I tried wesabe, but quickly gave up because I found the social networking feature to be mostly noise–mostly dingbats posting naive tips like “Get DVDs from the library instead of renting them ” or “Don’t go shopping when you’re hungry”.

By: Trent

Trent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:41:45 +0000

That’s kind of the point, Susan. Your data is already out there – you should have a *compelling* reason to spread it even further. I think for some people, these sites offer enough compelling features to make it worthwhile – for others, it’s not.

By: Susan

Susan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:37:30 +0000

All great points, but I think you can make the case that information is out there online all the time via your bank, credit cards, credit report, mortgage lenders, etc. etc. Isn’t all their information about us hooked up online as well?

I use a virtual bookkeeper to keep personal and business expenses and profits in check since my husband and I are incorporated for our freelance endeavors. On one hand, we could probably do it ourselves cheaper, but, we dont’ have the insight or knowledge on how to prepare our profit and loss sheets, write-offs, and a slew of other such details to our accountant. We realized we wouldn’t be spending that much more annually to have our accountant review it once year and clean up our attempt at it… and at a costly rate. It’s cheaper to have someone do it once a month and causes much less stress for us come tax time.

I think at the end of the day it’s about utilizing what’s available to you, online and off and taking precautions when possible. I mean, who’s to say you won’t get ripped off or your identity stolen for throwing out a bill?

http://www.familytravelforum.com

By: cybergal

cybergal — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:12:06 +0000

I second the Yodle Money Center! I’ve been using it for months and I absolutely LOVE it! Also, most of the other data consolidation apps use Yodlee as their backend. It give much more functionality than mint and allows tracking of everything: rewards points, frequent flyer miles, investments, bills, etc. Mint was WAY too basic for me … might be fine for a 20 year old with 1 bank account and 1 credit card account.

By: Mrs. Micah

Mrs. Micah — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:18:04 +0000

I like Mint, though I wish I could do more with the categories and such. Bleh.

By: David

David — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:40:53 +0000

I’ve tried both Mint and Quicken Online and definitely prefer Mint. The analysis tools are much better (their cool little pie chart that you can drill down with is very nice). Plus, it’s always nice to pull up Mint’s aggregate comparison tool and be able to see that I’m spending less on gasoline than the average citizen of Los Angeles.

Quicken also drastically overestimates what I’m spending, as it seems to count credit card payments as a purchase transaction, when in reality it’s just a transfer of money from my checking account to pay for all the other purchases that it knows about. Mint is smart enough to not give me double jeopardy for my credit card purchases.

I still use desktop Quicken for tracking my day to day spending, as it’s nice to be able to have it schedule bills and show me my future balance. I wish they’d get around to upgrading Quicken for Mac, though…..the thing looks like it hasn’t had a face-lift since 1994.

By: Eden

Eden — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:13:41 +0000

I don’t really see the appeal of taking your personal finances online. I am still using a version of Quicken from 2004 on my laptop. I was tempted to upgrade this year until I realized that this copy does everything I need so why waste the money.

Using Quicken online would be cheaper initially, but in a couple of years you will have paid more than you would if you purchased the desktop version.

I would absolutely never use any service like this that required any of my account usernames or passwords, though admittedly I don’t see the appeal of these services anyway so I guess I’m not the target audience.

By: Austin

Austin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:53:33 +0000

What about Geezeo? It has the same auto-aggregation and social features as Mint plus pulls in brokerage accounts which Mint can’t do. Mint uses Yodlee while Geezeo uses CashEdge.

By: junger

junger — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:52:45 +0000

Have you tried using Yodlee’s MoneyCenter app?
(moneycenter.yodlee.com).

It’s completely free, has no ads, and is as secure as your online bank (since Yodlee probably powers it).

The look isn’t as Web 2.0 as Mint, but it works.

I don’t have a lot of accounts — two checking, two savings, a 401k, and two Roths — but I couldn’t imagine online banking without aggregating them. I’ve also got my student loans there to track.

Even with very simple money management, it’s easy to have at least 5 accounts worth tracking.

By: N

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:52:28 +0000

Initially I had the same reservations about Mint. But then I realized that they don’t have my name, social security number or address – everything needed for someone to commit account fraud.

All Mint has are my account numbers and passwords. Even if someone were to obtain this information, they still wouldn’t have access to my SSN or name because neither is displayed on the bank’s web site. So in reality, that information is useless. You can’t open a credit card or transfer money out of my account with just this data.

Now I use Mint and it’s by far my favorite tool for keeping track of my spending.