Perhaps my favorite online development over the last year or so has been the explosion of Twitter. For those living under a rock who have not yet heard about Twitter, it’s pretty simple: it’s like instant messaging except everyone can read conversations and join in. You sign up for a free account there and can then send messages (and respond to the messages of others) whenever you want, from your computer or even from your cell phone via text message. You can also “follow” other people who have signed up for Twitter, enabling you to see all of their messages at once. So, when you visit Twitter, you’ll see the latest updates of all of the people you’re following (i.e. the people you’re interested in).

If you’d like to take a peek, feel free to check out my own updates. I also make Simple Dollar updates available on Twitter.

Anyway, one of the hottest topics among online marketers and bloggers is how exactly someone can use Twitter effectively to gain a following and perhaps grow one’s business. Twitter is particularly interesting in this regard because it allows one person to carry on something of a conversation with a large crowd of people that want to hear what they’re saying. Take my own account, for example: if I send an update, I’m effectively talking to 2,000 people who have chosen to hear what I have to say.

Surprisingly, out of this creative explosion has come a ton of bargains. Quite a few people have jumped on Twitter as a way to provide coupons for their business in a very inexpensive way. Others have written computer programs that scour the ‘net for bargains and post them automatically to Twitter. Still others are exploring giveaways and contests.

I’ve followed quite a few Twitterers who are trying these things and I’ve found ten well worth sticking with. Even if you don’t find them worth following, you may find this post worth bookmarking so that you can check in on these accounts from time to time.

DellOutlet – Dell already has excellent prices on computer systems, but they’re giving out some incredible deals directly on Twitter via the DellOutlet account. There are at least two items that I’m considering buying from Dell, so I’m just waiting until they pop up with great coupons on here. If you’re considering upgrading your PC, this is one that’s well worth following.

amazondeals – Every day, Amazon throws up a few “lightning deals” on their site, which are simply individual items sold at a pretty stiff discount for just an hour or two. I tend to follow these pretty closely, as there are often deals on there that can be “turned” for a profit or can be given as gifts later on (several of our Christmas gifts came from this feature). Amazon has chosen to share these on Twitter, which has made it very easy for me to keep tabs on these deals.

AmazonSteals – This one’s similar to the above “amazondeals” account, except this one isn’t directly affiliated with Amazon and it also digs deeper into specific Amazon categories to find steeply discounted items. It actually forms a very nice pair with amazondeals for digging up great deals buried within Amazon.

amazonmp3 – A legal mp3 album every day for $2. That’s basically what this account offers. The mix is widely varied, but I find about one album a month that’s well worth it for me (most recently, Urban Hymns by The Verve, which I listened to over and over again about twelve years ago).

dealyzer – This account seems to simply scavenge the web for huge discounts of all kinds. The mix is quite varied, but I find things regularly on here that are worth following up on (for example, I got the Planet Earth documentary set for my son for $34 shipped directly from Discovery because of this account).

shoppersshop – This is a very low traffic version of dealyzer. Outside of the pre-holiday sales, there’s only about one update a week or so, but when they come, they’re almost always well worth it. I actually found several of the other accounts listed on this page by following shopperssshop.

DealUniversity – Here’s another strong deal aggregator, but this one focuses almost exclusively on electronics deals. Their picks really are a mixed bag, but there are enough gems that come through to make it worthwhile if you are good at sniffing out deals on tech items.

cheaptweet – Cheaptweet is basically just an aggregation of the top picks from CheapTweet.com, which itself just scours Twitter for sales and other deals and allows users to vote up the best of the lot. There’s a fair amount of conversation in there, too, but when the deals come through, they’re usually good ones.

booksamillion – Run by the folks behind the Books-A-Million book chain, this account offers up deals on … books. Following this account is like shuffling through a good bargain table at a bookstore – you won’t be interested in most of it, but every once in a while a dirt-cheap new book will float through.

SmartyPig – I felt it appropriate to mention SmartyPig here, since I’ve been following them practically since their inception. SmartyPig is an online savings account with a goal-setting twist. So why mention their Twitter account? Every month, they give away a SmartyPig account with $100 in it on their Twitter feed (and their methods for determining winners is both transparent and entertaining). The traffic on here is pretty low, too – most of their Tweets are related to their monthly giveaway.

Do you know any other Twitterers that offer good deals on Twitter? Let us know in the comments!

About a week ago, my wife said (paraphrased), “We use a ton of websites to save ourselves a lot of money directly. Why don’t you write about those? You could just keep track of what sites you visit to save money over a week, how much they save, and whether or not this pays for our internet connection?”

A great idea. So that’s just what I did. Here are seven websites I used to directly save money over the last week, my exact purchases and savings, and how much cash they saved me. I’m not including banking or investing sites here – just sites I use to literally spend less money.

PaperBackSwap
PaperBackSwap is arguably our biggest regular saver (and one I’ve waxed ecstatic about on The Simple Dollar before). My wife and I both spend multiple hours a day reading – it’s our most constant hobby – but between the library, PaperBackSwap, and my wife’s use of ManyBooks.net on her Kindle, we basically haven’t bought a book in ages.

In a nutshell, PaperBackSwap works like this: you sign up, list ten books you’re willing to trade by mail, and the site gives you two credits. A book costs one credit – you “spend” one of those credits on the site to get any book they have listed sent to you. Every time you send a book to someone else, you get a credit.

Here are the books I’ve requested in the past week from PaperBackSwap (and a nice peek into my current literary tastes):
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
… and I also ordered The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion to be shipped to my mother, but I won’t count that one.

Assuming each used book is worth $2, that means I’ve saved $12 this week because of PaperBackSwap. While this isn’t entirely, perfectly accurate (I likely would have used the library and gotten other books), these books are now mine for as long as I like and I can mark up the margins and such as much as I want (which I often do if I’m really trying to understand a book).

SwapTree
While I love using PaperBackSwap and SwapADVD (below) for trading books and DVDs, respectively, there’s really no similar service for video games. At the same time, I like to play a wide variety of games for my Wii and for my Nintendo DS, particularly interesting puzzle games that make me think. Most games, though, intrigue me for a while, then I grow bored with them, so unsurprisingly, I want to trade them off. I used to take them to used game sellers, but I’ve started using SwapTree.com instead.

SwapTree is sort of like PaperBackSwap in that you’re swapping items online. The only catch is that it actually forces you into a direct one-on-one trade. If you list an item, someone else must have it already on their wishlist in order for you to trade it. There’s no way to get rid of a lot of stuff you don’t want (like when you clean out your book collection) and build up credit on there. You have to want something right now.

As a result, I prefer other services for trading some things, but this service works really well for video games.

In just the last week, I traded Resident Evil 4 (a shooting game that bored me to death) for Zack and Wiki (an adventure/puzzle game in the Monkey Island/King’s Quest mold). In essence, this was a free game. If I had bought it used (and traded in RE 4), it probably would have cost me $5-10, so in that respect, SwapTree saved me about $7.50 (or so).

FatWallet.com Forums
The FatWallet.com Forums are the best place to keep an eye out for extraordinary tech deals. If you need a particular piece of computer hardware, be patient and keep an eye on these forums. A friend of mine picked up an ultra-portable 7″ laptop with solid state storage and ridiculous battery life (7 or 8 hours) for $299.

My story from the last week? The MicroSD card in my phone stopped working, meaning I couldn’t store many pictures at all on my cell phone. So I wanted an ultra-cheap MicroSD card to replace it, preferably one at least a gigabyte in size. Bingo. I saved $3 from about two minutes of web surfing.

If I go on a book tour (a possibility), I might also go for one of those ultra-small ultra-light laptops just for writing while on the road. Guess where I’ll be watching for the right deal on it?

Coupons.com
Coupons.com is the site my wife and I use most frequently for coupons. My wife is actually the maven here, more than I am – she searches the site a couple times a week for coupons, particularly for ones that match our upcoming shopping list. For example, she found a $3 off Pert Plus coupon that we used to replace the shampoo and conditioner in our downstairs shower (the one that guests use) – it was free after the coupon.

At Coupons.com, things are pretty straightforward. It’s basically like going through one of those Sunday newspaper flyers online, except you just mark the ones you want and at the end you click on a “print” button and the ones you selected pop right out of your printer, easy as pie. We find it useful to use it after we’ve got our shopping list ready to go so we can find coupons that match it.

I tried to keep track of the Coupons.com coupons we used in the past week and came up with a total of $7 saved – two instances of the Pert Plus coupon, and two $0.50 savings on yogurt.

SwapADVD
SwapADVD is a sister service to PaperBackSwap where you can trade DVDs by mail. When you sign up, you just list ten DVDs you own that you’re willing to trade and the site gives you a credit, which you can use to request any DVD on their site. Whenever someone requests one of your DVDs, mail it out, and when they receive it, you get another credit. You can list as many DVDs as you want. My DVD collection is tiny, so I’ve never sent out a DVD via SwapADVD (yet – I have several I intend to swap soon) – instead, you can actually transfer extra credits from PaperBackSwap into SwapADVD (and since I’ve shipped out quite a few books via PaperBackSwap, I just pulled some of those credits into SwapADVD). I prefer it to Netflix simply because there’s no monthly fee at all. Once you have the DVD, just hold onto it as long as you want with no cost, then when you finally do watch it, just trade it again.

Anyway, over the last week, I’ve requested Road to Perdition, Adaptation, Thank You for Smoking, and Crash, just so that we have a few new interesting films to watch on those rare evenings when the kids go to bed early and we want to cuddle up with a glass of wine and a good movie.

Assuming a used DVD is worth $3, that means SwapADVD saved us $12 in the past week.

Home Depot’s Home How-To Site
I’m absolutely atrocious at home improvement tasks, but we’ve been wanting to install a ceiling fan in both my office and in the kids’ bedroom. I’ve been really hesitant to work on the project and wanted to hire someone to do it (if you’ll remember, I was trying to talk myself into it just a little over a week ago), but I finally bucked down and went for it, using their wonderful guide to installing a ceiling fan, including an excellent summary video. This guide directly saved me the cost of hiring someone to do it – $40 or so, perhaps.

Home Depot’s Know How section is excellent. There are useful guides on all sorts of projects, and I’m trying to build up the courage to use it to replace a toilet. Almost always, I’m glad I’ve done it myself afterwards, but I have a lot of apprehension about it beforehand – guides like these help push me towards the goal.

Upcoming Events Calendars
My family and I are constantly on the lookout for interesting things to do that get us out and about in the community (and in neighboring ones), enjoying new things, meeting new people, and so on. The problem is finding interesting ones – it’s easy to go to places that are expensive and have fun, but there’s always free stuff going on.

That’s why we hit the community calendars of several area communities to see what’s going on, particularly the Ames, Iowa and Ankeny, Iowa ones, along with a huge number of community calendars for small towns in Story, Polk, Marshall, Boone, Jasper, and Dallas Counties. We’ll even go further for interesting stuff, such as Pella’s Tulip Festival in the spring.

Community events provide a great deal of our entertainment. Let’s assume each community event saves us $5 as a family if we choose to do that instead of something else. In the last week, community calendars saved us $20 – it pointed us to a free public fireworks display on the 4th, towards a farmers’ market, towards a cultural festival in a nearby small town, and towards a free concert, too.

Find and bookmark some community calendars near you and check them out when you’re planning your weekend. You might just find some interesting stuff free in the community.

Totaling It Up
Let’s look at the total savings!
PaperBackSwap: $12
SwapTree: $7.50
FatWallet.com Forums: $3
Coupons.com: $7
SwapADVD: $12
Home Depot: $40
Community calendars: $20

We used the web to directly save $101.50 in the past week in free (or vastly reduced) entertainment, coupons, and home improvement tasks. This easily pays for the cost we put into it.

What about that time investment? Our time investment for this stuff is surprisingly small. We have all of these sites bookmarked and we only use them when we have a specific purpose in mind (”How do I fix that leaky toilet? I need to replace that SD card! My bookshelf is getting thin! Is there anything interesting to do Sunday afternoon?). When you know what you’re going in for, it doesn’t take long at all – just a moment or two, and it’s certainly quicker than doing the equivalent things offline.

Give some of these services a try – I hope you’ll find them as useful (and cost-saving) as we do.

When I first started The Simple Dollar, I mostly intended it as a place to log my own personal financial progress and also note any interesting thoughts or findings I discovered related to personal finance and other related topics. My primary goal was to make myself write every day and also to motivate myself to keep going forward with my financial turnaround – and maybe tease out some of the root causes of it.

While it’s grown beyond that original plan, it certainly has fulfilled the motivational part of the goal. I’m motivated every day to keep my finances in line, to the point that it’s become an integrated part of my life. It may have happened without The Simple Dollar, but the motivational factor of putting my situation out so publicly was an enormous motivator.

The best part is such public motivation can be done by anyone and can be applied to any goal. Here’s how.

Define Your Goal
The first step in achieving something is to clearly state what you’re trying to achieve. What are you aiming for?

Figure out what you want to change. Most of us already have this part figured out. We know what we want – we want better health, a better figure, a greater financial life, a better job, a business of our own. The problem is that goals are often nebulous and thus are easy to pass through – just like a cloud. So, once you know the change you want to implement…

Define exactly what it means to achieve that change. If you want to lose weight, figure out your target weight. If you want to improve your financial state, figure out a target debt level or target net worth. Want a better job? Define exactly what that job is. Know exactly what your goal is and exactly how you can determine if you’ve made it.

Devise a plan to take you to that exact goal. Now that you have a specific goal, what steps do you need to take to get there? Let’s say your goal is a specific net worth. That means you need to reduce spending, increase your income, or both. What’s your plan of attack? What about a target weight or BMI? That will likely involve dietary changes and an exercise regimen. What’s your plan of attack?

Define Daily (or Near-Daily) Metrics for that Goal
Once you’ve got your goal specified and have a plan in place to reach that goal, you also need to define very specific microgoals along the way. Losing fifty pounds is not something you can grab ahold of today, but losing one pound is. Exercising for thirty minutes every day isn’t something you can grab ahold of, but exercising just today for thirty minutes is something you can do.

Look at your specific goal and your plan to get there. What sort of regular, repetitive steps will you have to take to get there? If you need to eat better, your regular, repetitive step comes with each meal. If you need to exercise, your regular, repetitive step is a daily (or near-daily) exercise session. If you need to start saving, a spending log is perfect. If you need to start building up your resume or just learn something new, learning something each day and documenting it is a great way to go. A musical instrument? Daily practice is perfect.

The point is to define those tiny steps you need to take each day. Make them small enough so that you actually can take those steps each day and you’ll find yourself walking right toward your goal.

Announce Your Progress with those Metrics to the World
One big problem, though, is motivation. How can you keep motivated to take those small steps? Some people have that internal motivation, but others are often driven to be motivated by others, and that’s when online tools can help.

Twitter is a great way to publicly log your progress. Twitter lets you publicly post quick reports that are 140 characters in length – perfectly long to note spending, eating, a daily weight check, learning, your daily practice, and so on. If you’d like to write longer entries, starting a free blog like the one at Wordpress is a great way to go. Putting it out there publicly means that some strangers might visit, but you can cover that up by being fairly anonymous – using just your first name, for example. Even better, strangers often provide great motivation in the little comments that they make.

This daily logging routine is a way to provide a check against yourself. Did you do what you were supposed to do today? Did you take that little step towards your big goal?

The real motivator, though, is letting your friends and family see it. When you start, send out that URL to supportive family and friends and ask them to take a look and keep tabs on it. Almost any caring family member or friend will happily do so and probably send you supportive notes along the way. It takes some personal courage to share things in this fashion, but the rewards are great – you’ll find yourself with a support network that’s intimately familiar with your progress, knows what your goal is, and best of all knows you well and cares about you. These people can be the best motivators of all.

How I’m Doing It
I’m actually using Twitter myself for this very thing. Recently, my wife and I made a strong commitment to get into better shape, and I elected to track my progress publicly on Twitter. I set up a fresh new Twitter account and am posting brief updates each day on how I’m doing. To up the pressure on myself, I shared the link with friends.

And now I’m going to up the pressure even higher.

http://twitter.com/trenthealth

That’s my health log in Twitter form. That’s right, I’m revealing my daily BMI, diet, and exercise progress to 50,000 readers. If you’re interested in following along, bookmark it. I estimate it’ll have 5-10 quick blips a day.

My goal with it is to use Wii Fit, the lifetime fitness ladder, and a better diet (basically following Michael Pollan’s guidance from In Defense of Food) to push myself to two goals: a BMI of 22 (which my doctor recommended as a good long-term target for my body build – I’m 6′6″ and have the shoulder width of an NFL linebacker) and to consider riding a leg of RAGBRAI next year. I anticipate both goals taking a year or more, actually.

We’ll see where I get, but I can certainly say this: the idea that there are many friends and readers watching is both an exhilarating rush and also makes me a bit nervous. Having that many eyeballs on my progress is one big motivator.

As I mentioned before, when I first began my financial turnaround, I constructed a tight budget and stuck to it like glue for the first few months. That tight budget was invaluable – it taught me how to ride the proverbial bicycle that is personal finance management.

One of the biggest tools I used during this process was PearBudget, which was a free Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that helped automate many of the basic tasks of developing a budget. That spreadsheet is still available for free online – it requires Microsoft Excel, but it’s still one heck of a useful tool. While I didn’t end up using that PearBudget sheet for my own budget (I used it to evaluate a lot of ideas, but I had a lot of fun hacking Excel to do things exactly how I visualized in my head – not really in a way that makes sense to anyone else), I used it a ton in figuring out my own ideas and assembling them.

Not too long ago, I discovered that the people who developed PearBudget were converting it into a web application – and I was immediately apprehensive. I am very concerned about personal information security, especially when it comes to personal finance and the modern web. Here’s what I wrote on that issue a while back when reviewing other online personal finance tools:

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous – you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever – but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free – but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment – they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands – and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

I had zero interest in using PearBudget Online unless there was a compelling solution to this issue – and their solution is actually pretty good. Basically, it doesn’t want any of your account information. None. Instead, you just enter your expenses and income as raw numbers and add them into the categories you’ve defined yourself. Since your account info there is essentially anonymous and there’s no association to your real financial data, the privacy concern is almost nonexistent.

Even better, PearBudget distinguishes itself from other such online tools by not including ads in the service – Mint, for example, uses targeted advertising to cover the bills. PearBudget has a 30 day free trial, then charges $3 a month for the service – a nominal fee if you find it useful.

So how does it work?

A Brief Walkthrough of PearBudget Online
When you first visit PearBudget Online, you’re guided through a wizard that lets you define the categories in your budget (they offer a bunch of suggestions and groupings, but let you add your own as you want). You then identify them as regular expenses (ones you have every month) or irregular ones (like property taxes), identify how much you spend monthly on the regular expenses and annually on the irregular ones, enter how much income you get (you can identify as many income sources as you want), and you’re done! It generates a spending plan for you. Seriously, try it out – it only takes a few minutes and it’s really slick. To try it out, I entered a bunch of dummy data and it took me about three minutes – but when I saw how slick and useful it was, I wanted to do it with real data – and so I did.

Once you’ve set up your categories, you basically have three modes: plan (where you look at your spending plan and possibly add new spending categories as you see fit), enter (where you enter receipts as you spend money throughout the month), and review (where you look over how your spending matches your budget).

I was genuinely impressed with how slick the software is. For most people trying to figure out a budget, it’s a great way to dig in and get started very quickly and effortlessly. It’s very flexible – you can define your own categories however you like, which is something that I think is essential when budgeting in the real world, as everyone groups their spending in different ways. PearBudget lets you group it pretty much however you want.

My Thoughts
First, the bad. I really only have one significant criticism when it comes to PearBudget Online. First, it does cost $3 a month after the 30 day trial. While that’s a nominal fee (in my eyes), some people will be hesitant to dive in and really try the tool because if they get involved with the tool, that $3 a month effectively becomes another bill. One option the creators might want to consider is to have a “free” account that displays ads or a paid account that does not. I, for one, would pay the $3 not to have the ads. Alternately, a person could just do the whole thing offline and use the old PearBudget spreadsheet for free.

Aside from that, the tool is impressive to use and handles my security concerns better than any online tool I’ve seen. If you’re trying to budget, I heartily recommend giving PearBudget Online a try. If you’re concerned about the $3 a month fee (and for people on tight budgets, this can be an issue), give the old PearBudget spreadsheet a whirl – it helped me out once upon a time.

Over the last week, SuperCook has quickly become one of my favorite websites. Basically, SuperCook is a database of recipes that works in a very clever fashion – just start entering ingredients in the upper left and it will start listing recipes on the right. Every time you add another ingredient, it finds recipes using only those ingredients and only a minimum of additional items. So, let’s say you add “tomato sauce,” “pasta,” and “pork” – it’ll suggest spaghetti with marinara sauce, which you’ll only need parmesan cheese for.

It’s not perfect yet (there’s some limited ingredient misidentification), but the potential for an amazing amount of utility is in place. I found a wonderful simple grilled fish recipe very quickly just playing around with the tool. Quite simply, this is a wonderful online tool for anyone who cooks at home.

Naturally, I began to look at this tool through the lens of how can it save money for me and my readers. Here are some ways you can apply this tool to save money in your own kitchen.

Dig through the cupboards. You likely have some stuff buried in the back that you haven’t thought about using in ages. Plug it into this tool, add a few other seemingly compatible things you have lying around, and see what recipes this tool gives you. Ideally, you’ll come up with a number of interesting recipes.

Sit down with your grocery flyer. Find out what foods are on sale this week, then use the tool to see what sort of recipes you can make from these items that are on sale. Fish fillets, lemon juice, and potatoes are on sale? Pop all of those into this tool and it’ll spit out some recipes. Just go through the whole flyer and enter everything that seems tasty and you’ll find a big bundle of complete and nearly-complete recipes just waiting to be used.

Buy in bulk. If you have an opportunity to buy food in bulk, this tool can be phenomenal for helping you generate a ton of ideas for what to do with it. We’re considering buying a quarter of a cow for our deep freezer, so we’ve been looking at lots of beef recipes. I entered “beef” into this tool and was flooded with ideas, so I started thinking of foods that, in my mind, would be tasty with beef. There are more ideas here than I can possibly use, and I’m further convinced that the purchase is a good idea that will save us some real money.

Inspire yourself. Often, the one thing that gets me into the kitchen after a long day at work is inspiration – the idea that I can quickly cook something quite delicious for my family. All I have to do for some inspiration is to put in a thing or two that sound really tasty to me right now – say, chicken and parmesan cheese, and see what I can find. Then I keep adding stuff I know I have around the kitchen until I find a recipe.

SuperCook has very quickly become a part of our family’s meal planning routine, and it’s already saved us quite a bit of money by helping us figure out what to do with what we already have in the cupboard in conjunction with what’s on sale at the grocery store. Check it out.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about web-based personal finance tracking tools, especially since Intuit launched Quicken Online and Mint won the TechCrunch 40 award. These conversations have led in many directions – clearly these tools are useful, but are they worth the security concerns? Let’s take a look at what these tools have to offer and what the security implications are, and I’ll offer up my own take at the end.

What Do These Tools Do?

In a nutshell, Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe seek to provide centralized perspectives on your personal financial situation. They do things like categorize your credit card and checking spending into groups like “hobbies” and “food,” keep track of your net worth over a long period, and can even help you define and work towards goals. They aggregate your information automatically, helping you to see your spending and saving across all accounts at once. In other words, they’re all pretty nifty and offer some serious benefits.

Quicken Online
Having tried all three, I found Quicken Online to be the most usable and useful – but that may be because I am familiar with the desktop version of Quicken. Basically, Quicken Online is a web-based version of the classic Quicken software package. It collects information from all of your accounts and lets you review it in countless ways. You can set up goals, view the changes in your spending and saving over time (as you build up the data), and even helps you manage the lag between issuing a check and having it received by the people you’re sending it to. It’s easily the most feature-rich of the three and it’s ad-free, but it’s also the only one with a fee – $2.99 a month. Out of the three packages, I’m partial to this one – if I were to commit to using one of the three wholeheartedly, it’d be this one.

Mint
Mint is probably the most visually stunning and intuitive to use, but it’s also the one that makes me the most nervous about security. Mint offers many of the same services as Quicken Online, but without a fee – instead, they target you with very specific ad offers based on analysis of how you actually spend your money. If I was having trouble getting my finances in order, this would make me somewhat nervous, as it seems to be tempting fate. Still, their interface is stunning and, minus the offers, is probably the most useable of the three.

Wesabe
Wesabe is the most established of the three, is also free, and is likely the most secure. They never take any of your account information – instead, you use a tool on your own computer to build a report without account data in it, and this report is shipped off to Wesabe. They never see your specific account data. Also, they don’t mine their data to place targeted ads – instead, their business model revolves around selling “Pro” accounts with more features. It also has a lot of social networking aspects – you can quickly find people with similar financial goals and find out, in a broad sense, how your spending compares to the Wesabe community. It’s actually quite fun.

The Big Drawback

First of all, I don’t question that each of these sites have integrity when it comes to security. In fact, Wesabe was the first of these three tools to launch and I strongly criticized their security initially – and was pleasantly surprised by the openness of the company to discuss and resolve these issues. I believe that Mint, Wesabe, and Quicken Online all intend to keep your data safe.

But that doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous – you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever – but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free – but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment – they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands – and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

What Do I Do?

I think tools like Quicken Online are great if you have a plethora of accounts to manage and have a hard time seeing the big picture. In that case, the benefits exceed the drawbacks – tools like these can really help you get a grip on things.

In my opinion, though, it’s not the best solution. The best solution is minimizing your accounts so that you’re not bogged down in account management. Do you need eight credit card accounts? Kill the ones you don’t use, save for perhaps your oldest one, and try to get down to two or (at most) three. How about five different retirement plans? Roll them together if you can – spend the time to see what your best option is and you’ll find yourself with a lot less effort to manage accounts.

Right now, I have one checking account, one savings account, two credit card accounts, one investment account, and one retirement account. It’s simple enough that I don’t need to use a tool like Quicken Online to see all of this information, and I don’t spend much time with account management either. I keep my net worth calculations in a spreadsheet – and it’s pretty clear from that data whether I’m doing well or doing poorly.

If you keep things simple to begin with, you don’t need complex tools to manage it. Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe are nifty tools, but you can often get just as much benefit by just simplifying your money – and then not expose yourself to even a tiny security risk, monthly fees, or highly targeted ads.

Other Perspectives

I felt it appropriate to include some additional viewpoints on these products from other blogs that I trust.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly thinks Quicken Online looks promising, likes Mint with some caveats, and thinks Wesabe is a stellar Quicken supplement.

Lifehacker offers screenshot tours of Quicken Online, Wesabe, and Mint.

I get contacted quite regularly by groups who are creating Web 2.0 personal finance applications, and I’ve taken test drives of a lot of them. I’ve even been asked to advise on a few that are in the pipeline. If you’d like to sample a few, I’ve linked to a few of the best ones at the bottom.

What are they? These tools are basically online versions of Quicken. They allow you to aggregate all of your personal finance data in one place so you can get a clear picture of how you’re doing. Most of them have very slick user interfaces, too. Even better, they allow you to share some aspects of the data so you can compare goals with other users.

Yet, even though the features of many of them are amazing and I can easily see the usefulness of them, I haven’t yet reviewed any of them in detail, nor do I plan to.

Why not? All of these systems have one key issue that concerns me: personal security. I’m not talking about whether your data is safe from hackers. What concerns me is trusting my key personal finance information to a Silicon Valley startup company. Almost all of these products come from relatively small, non-public startups that are currently running on venture capital money.

To me, this is a giant red flag waving around in the sky. I watched an awful lot of dot-coms blow up in 2001 and their data went away to … who knows where. Where will the data go if these companies go under? Will the owners dispose of that data ethically? Will they sell it? Most of them have privacy disclaimers, but a legal document doesn’t really help if your bank login information and your credit card data is floating around on a laptop in Armenia.

The one key piece that these organizations forget is that your personal information and logins are extremely valuable. Your logins provide access to your money and your personal data, and if these logins fall into the wrong hands, bad things can potentially happen – lost funds, identity theft, and so on.

The best solution to this is to minimize the number of places that have your key personal data. I trust my banks and my credit card holders – and that’s pretty much it. The fewer places that my personal data resides, the better.

This sounds like an indictment of these tools, but it’s not – they have a lot of potential. But that potential lies with integration with the banks themselves, like ING or HSBC. Make it so that the access to your accounts lie with the bank itself, the entity that already has your information, and the risk to personal data issues is reduced. These tools shouldn’t be a separate entity from these institutions, but integrated into their online interface.

In other words, Mint et. al. should evolve to be the front end for online banking services. I like the ING Direct interface (after all, it’s my primary bank), but if that site had the interface of Mint, with all of the interesting tools and such and was already within the secure environment of a bank that already had my data, I’d feel far more secure about trying out such a tool.

In the future, I hope to jump into such a tool head first – my enthusiasm would know no limits. But the security issues keep me from signing up with this first generation of Web 2.0 personal finance tools.

Want to see what I’m talking about? Here are three of the best Web 2.0 online personal finance tools. I recommend looking at them, but I don’t recommend giving them any personal information.

Mint is the “hot” one at the moment, having recently won the TechCrunch 40 “contest.” I also think their user interface has the most potential if used in the ways I describe above.
Wesabe is probably the most personable of the lot – the CEO will directly answer your questions. I also think their security model is the best of those out there right now, but it still makes me nervous.
Yodlee is the most established of the group, but the interface isn’t nearly as slick.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One of the most valuable things that a person can do when learning about personal finance issues is to get a diversity of perspectives and ideas. The more ideas you learn about and the more perspectives you get, the better your undersanding of personal finance will be and the more likely you are to make strong choices.

The advent of blogging has made this much easier than before – it used to be that you would have to read lots of personal finance books and magazines to get a variety of perspectives. Now, with just a mouse click or two, you can read lots of different perspectives and ideas for free from the convenience of your own computer.

I encourage you to spend an hour digging into the archives of a personal finance blog so you can really begin to learn the basic perspectives of a particular site. Here are some things you can do, using The Simple Dollar as an example at first, then giving you some pointers to other sites if you want to look for excellent ideas and opinions elsewhere.

Read the “About” page. Find out what kind of perspective the blogger is offering. Quite often, this will clue you in to some of the assumptions of the writing on the site.

Sample some of the “best” posts. Look for a “best of” section and, if you find it, sample a few of those articles. This will give you some very tasty morsels to start off with.

Dig into the archives. Most sites provide an archive of some sort that’s easy to browse through; on The Simple Dollar, the best place to start is probably the one page chronology of all posts. I usually find it best to start from the beginning with a site, not necessarily reading everything, but focusing on those articles that are interesting to me.

Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or directly contact a blog if you have questions. I strongly urge you to be complimentary if you write to someone, though – if you look through a blog’s archives, recognize that all of the writing is a labor of love by a single person (or a small group) and they’re basically giving the material away for free for you to read, paying for the server space where that information is stored.

Here are a few blogs that are worth digging into that I particularly enjoy:

Get Rich Slowly has an about page and has a wonderful single page archive to get you started.

Money, Matter, and More Musings has an about page, a page of the most popular posts, and also a single page of extensive archives.

Generation X Finance has an “about” page and a extensive, well organized archive.

Any of the other sites listed in the sidebar here are also worth digging into.