Getting Started On Web Based Money Management

Over at Freelance Switch, Collis Ta'eed has done a fantastic job of pulling together all of the pieces that can help you manage your Money Online. Collis has put together blogs, news, reviews, advice and even video clips, to help you get your feet wet in Online Money Management. Well worth the trip take a look.

Here is just part of FreelanceSwitch - Everything You Need to Manage Your Money Online:

Money Management Tools

Wesabe

Wesabe thankfully couldn’t care less what country you are in. This is presumably because they don’t actually connect to your bank account. Instead they provide you a series of uploader tools (including a Firefox extension) that let you upload an account export from your bank account. Once you have your accounts in there, you tag and organise your spending and you can do the usual things like graph and analyse.

The kicker is that Wesabe is money management meets web 2.0 and has a large community of other struggling and mastering people just like me (hopefully not too much like me). Using this shared knowledge base you can get tips on savings tailored to your spending patterns, make goals and generally interact with other people. I’ve only just arrived at Wesabe, but this looks to me like a pretty neat aspect to it all and I’m looking forward to exploring it more.

You can read LifeHacker’s review of Wesabe or Wired’s comparison of Mint and Wesabe and you can see their introductory video here:

Mint Money Management

Mint was released near the end of 2007 and by all accounts is a fantastic product (sadly for me it’s made for a US audience). It connects with your bank and card providers to auto-balance and auto-categorize your transactions, it charts your spending trends and patterns and recommends everything from credit cards to bank accounts to cable providers. You can read two fairly thorough reviews of Mint here and here.

If I was an American I would seriously consider Mint, but as it is, I’m sticking with Wesabe!

Geezeo

Geezeo is a product that looks quite similar to Wesabe in many ways. It’s got the usual money management tools and a bit of the social power of Wesabe mixed in for good measure. The interface is very web 2.0 which I don’t mind and I like their tag ‘educated financial decisions’, but alas I came to Wesabe first and now I’m a convert. Still Geezeo looks like it’s worth checking out if you’re still deciding.

Other Products

GnuCash - If you like your accounts mixed up open-source style, then you’ll love GnuCash. From all accounts it’s quite powerful, though personally - and you can call me shallow - I just can’t get past the open source homepage to find out for myself.

QuickenOnline - Quicken is a major player offline and have taken their product on to the web to make sure they don’t leave people like me behind. Their product has the benefit of a familiar face to it as well as a brand you probably already trust. You can read a good review at GetRichSlowly

Sphere: Related Content