budgeting personal finances

Five Best Personal Money Management Sites

Web-based financial management tools have grown in sophistication to the point where many people manage their entire financial lives with online tools. Here's a look at five of the most popular personal money management sites.

Photo a mashup of images by Leonardini and Wilton.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite personal money management site; now we're back to highlight the five most popular contenders.

Click on the screenshots below to take a closer look.

Buxfer (Basic: Free, Premium: From $2.79/month)

Many people are hesitant to use online banking services because of security concerns. Buxfer's compromise to provide ease of use while also assuring users and keeping things as controlled as they would like is to offer multiple methods for storing your credentials. You can manually synchronize your financial accounts with the site, you can store your passwords and login credentials locally using Google Gears, Firefox, or Safari, or you can use the Firebux Firefox extension—Firebux helps you automate the process of downloading financial data from your banking institutions and reviewing Buxfer data. If you'd like to skip the hassle of handling your own syncing, Buxfer offers automatic nightly syncing of your financial data, automatically logging into and pulling data from your various online money portals. Buxfer comes in three flavors: Basic (free), Plus ($2.79 per month), and Pro ($3.79 per month). All accounts include features like split bills, automatic tagging, and mobile access, but you'll pay a premium for unlimited budgets, bill reminders, and balance projections. You can try a live demo of Buxfer here.

Yodlee MoneyCenter (Free)

As many readers were quick to point out, Yodlee provides the guts to the user sites for hundreds of banking and financial services. Organizations like Mint, Thrive, and large banks like Chase use rebranded but Yodlee-powered interfaces. Yodlee users will often characterize Yodlee as similar to Mint, but without such a strong emphasis on flashy graphics. Instead it focuses more on analyzing your raw data—transaction descriptions, for example, are easier to search and more detailed. Yodlee can import data from thousands of institutions, help you generate a budget, automate your bill paying, and send out user-defined alerts. If you like the idea of a site like Mint but want more fine-grained control and the ability to manually tweak things when necessary, Yodlee is a solid alternative.

Mint (Free)

Mint has risen to prominence as a major player among web-based financial management tools by putting an extreme emphasis on user-friendliness and automation. The focus on automation is so strong, in fact, they only recently added the ability to add in any sort of manual transactions. By providing Mint with your various logins, you can track all your financial accounts in one place—checking, savings, credit cards, investments—and easily generate budgets and projections based off your data. Mint has won many people over, especially in the younger demographic, by being the first tool they've used to really get a good look at their money and where it's going.

ClearCheckbook (Basic: Free, Premium: $4/month)

ClearCheckbook is a web-based checking account ledger on steroids. You can track your spending, input your daily expenses from the web-interface or from your iPhone, Android, or Palm, and generate a budget with spending limits. Upgrading to a premium account gets you a custom report tool, custom transaction fields, future balance projection, and editing of the auto-suggest feature. Visit ClearCheckbook at the link above to check out the video tours of both the free and premium accounts—available at the bottom of the main page.

Mvelopes ($39.60/quarter)

Mvelopes is a robust web-based financial tool built on the old principle of budgeting with envelopes—each budget category gets an envelope with a set amount of money. Its focus on an old budgeting technique, however, doesn't mean you're stuck with dated tools. Mvelopes automatically pulls transaction data from hundreds of financial institutions, supports automatic bill payment, and helps you generate snapshots of your net worth as you adjust your budget and goals. Mvelopes is notable for being the only contender in the Hive without a free account option, a testament perhaps to how happy people are with the service that it made an appearance in the top five despite the lack of free-as-in-beer option.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal money management sites, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:

Have a favorite web-based tool that didn't get a nod or want to talk up your favorite a bit more? Let's hear it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to get your idea the attention it deserves.

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

What a fantastic basic concept.

Hitler lost the second world war because he attacked Russia too soon. udervise ve vood all be speeking Deutsch now.

We employed the alternative massively effective budgetting tool.

Be a self employed Engineer for 15 years with take home pay of £50K a year and spend it all (and more besides, because ‘I want one of those NOW’) because ‘my jobs safe’.

Watch as the banks destroy the worlds finances.

Suddenly realise that over 90% of British industry is ultimately owned by Japanese investment banks, who suddenly have no money to fulfill their legal obligations to complete legislation driven improvment projects.

Watch as my £50K a year take home falls to ZERO.

Start a brand new business with Kleeneze (sorry not available in the USA) Which although it’s building really well is , after all, a business and needs time.

Suddenly HAVE to live on £18K a year GROSS.

Best Motivation for re-inventing your budget that anyone can have LOL.

We used to spend about £1,000 a month on groceries, now we spend around £300 a month, AND we eat more healthily.

Fortunately the finance on my car ended a month after our income disappeared saving us £375 a month.

We’ve sold my wifes’ car (THAT hurt) it was a really nice car, but it was costing us £489 a month in finance.

We’ve moved to a cheaper house saving us £400 a month in rent.

We’ve cancelled everything that wasn’t absolutely essential - including SKY and the TV license (It’s true, you don’t die if you turn the telly off!)

We still have creditors who we’re negotiating reduced payments and frozen interest with, but basically we are starting again from scratch.

We won’t fall into the credit trap again

Certainly not in the next six years or more ‘cos no-one in their right mind will give us credit now anyway!!

The one thing that keeps coming back to me though is

WHY aren’t our schools teaching kids how to budget? It’s a thousand times more important than even the basics.

Who cares if you can’t spell budgit if you can make one and stick to it.

It CAN’T be one of the things that are left to parents because nobody ever taught us!

Back to subject,

Your article is brilliant and if it helps one person (which I’m sure it already has) to get out or stay out of debt then you’ve done a service to humanity.

Keep it up &

we’ll see you

OVER the top

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Clearcheckbook.com is a relatively new web site, started in 2006 by Brandon O'Brien. The web site's budgeting features are useful for anyone looking for ways to control finances, but it is especially geared towards people who prefer a simple, intuitive program for budgeting and money management. Unlike some personal finance software programs, Clearcheckbook is straight forward, easy to learn and easy to use. And it's free!

Account Features

You can create as many accounts as you want on Clearcheckbook.com. Accounts are created and edited easily. Clearcheckbook.com does not link to your bank account; instead, you enter transactions yourself. This is an advantage to many people, because it places the budgeting process in your own hands: you can keep better track of your personal finances by taking a more active role in tracking your budget.

Budgeting Features

Clearcheckbook.com has many useful budgeting features. It allows for the creation of categories. You can define and edit as many categories as you need, from groceries to entertainment. After you create your categories, you can impose spending limits on each category. This feature allows you to carefully monitor your expenditures so that you do not spend over your budget.

Clearcheckbook.com also allows you to place a spending limit for each account. If you want to be sure you do not overspend on one account, you can quickly type in your limit. Colorful indicators let you know when you are reaching your limit; they turn orange as you near your limit and red when you reach it.

You can also set up reminders for bills or upcoming transactions, as well as set up recurring transactions.

Adding Entries

After you log into your Clearcheckbook.com account, you will be brought to your Account Summary page. Here you can see the balances of each of your accounts, as well as your most recent transactions. On this page you'll find the Quick Add Entry tool. Here you can add transactions, citing the date, place, amount, category, type (deposit/withdrawal), and account. The budgeting website also allows for split entries, easing the process of entering correct categories for individual transactions.

Importing/Exporting Records

If you have used other personal finance software and wish to import you records into clearcheckbook.com, you can easily do so by using the import tool. QIF, OFX, and QFX files are suported.

Reports

Good budgeting practice requires that you review and analyze your spending. Clearcheckbook.com has a section for Reports, where you can view your expenditures in terms of graphs and and charts. The charts are easy to read and printable.

Mobility

For some people, using budgeting software can be difficult in managing their personal finances because it is a process that is somewhat detached; in other words, you do not review your finances at the time you're shopping, instead, you sit down once a week or so and enter your transactions, only to find you overspent sometime during the week. One of the great features about Clearcheckbook.com is its mobility. Using their integrated CheckBot program, you can check your account balances, spending limits, and even add deposits and withdrawals, all from the convenience of your cell phone. Clearcheckbook.com has a list of codes that you can text message in order to view your account. With CheckBot, you can immediately see where your personal finances stand.

Conclusion

Because Clearcheckbook.com is so new a website, there are sometimes some small bugs that need to be worked out. But the features keep getting better and better. And even if you do run into a technical problem, send an email to the administrator. In my personal experience, I have had every email answered politely and quickly. The developer is also excellent at integrating user suggestions into new versions of the personal finance software. If you're looking for a way to easily keep on top of your budget, try Clearcheckbook.com. It's free, so you have nothing to lose!





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