Five Great Web-Tools for Personal Finance Management
There are several personal finance management tools available to you, both on your personal computer, and on the internet. Some offer automatic updating from your bank, credit card provider, or other financial institution, which can give you up to date reports and automatic notices. Some offer the ability to manage your finances off-line, making an internet connection unnecessary. Selecting the best tool for you will depend upon what features you need.
Here are my five favorites:
1. Mint - Free to use, web-based, budgeting and automatic consolidation of reports from various financial institutions. Also handles investments.
2. Excel – Run on your personal computer, a Microsoft Office product. Excel is a DIY spreadsheet program with a great deal of capability for managing your finances. The downside is that it is not automatically updated, although many on-line banking accounts will allow downloads in a format easily imported into Excel.
3. Quicken - Also can be run on your PC, but now also available on-line. Quicken has long been one of the leaders in personal finance management software. (Quicken On-Line is now affiliated with Mint.com, and their offerings are expected to soon be consolidated.)
4. Yodlee MoneyCenter - Free to use, web-based, budgeting and automatic consolidation of reports from various financial institutions. Even offers current value estimates of real estate holdings.
5. Microsoft Money – Was Microsoft’s challenger to Quicken, but their on-line version never really took off well. (Jan. 31, 2011 is the projected end-of-life for the program, although support will continue for the foreseeable future.) Money is said to be less intuitive and user-friendly than other similar programs, but aficionados claim it is as powerful a tool as anyone could want.
For someone interested in budgeting, monitoring expenses and handling investments, I highly recommend that you check out Mint.com. I feel it is the best of the five listed, with Yodlee coming in a close second.
As with any on-line transaction, security should be a major concern. Ensure that the on-line tool you select offers .shtml (secure) pages. I recommend never accessing any financial site from a public computer. Always close the browser after you’re done, to clear any information from the computer’s cache file. With proper security, the only reason you should ever have to stand in line at the bank is to deposit or withdraw cash.
And even for that, we have ATMs.