In the past few months, I’ve been trying to be more strict with my money management. The most pressing reason is we’ve just bought a house, but I also would like to know in more detail where, and when my money is spent, and what it is spent on. After spending a few minutes researching online budget management tools, I came across MoneyTrackin.com. This online service was recommended as a new, accessible, free, and easy way to track your budget, so I signed up.
After a few weeks of use, I have decided that I don’t like MoneyTrackin.com enough to continue using it. For a tool like this to be useful, it has to be really easy to use, enough so that I am motivated to input my daily transactions, and track my finances. MoneyTrackin.com isn’t hard to use, it’s just not as easy as I would like. In today’s age of new fancy widgets and AJAX server updates, moneytrackin’ seems a bit outdated. The ‘add transaction’ interface seems clunky and time consuming - even the ‘quick insert’ doesn’t seem quick enough (although, they’ve recently added a clickable calendar in the ‘quick insert’ dialog that speeds things up a bit).
In order to properly categorize transactions, moneytrackin has a modern tag feature, where you can tag your transactions with any relevant keywords. Unfortunately, they delimit tags with spaces, not commas, meaning that you can only use single word tags. I would much rather have comma delimited tags, which would allow me to use more than one word for my tags, such as “123 Main St” for my household bills. I tried a compromise, by using plus signs, or no spaces for my keywords, but it still bothers me.
MoneyTrackin.com has a few good features that make it almost worth keeping. Their reports/charts/tagclouds give you many great ways to display and visualize your data. Also, they have a unique “tips” feature, where users are encouraged to post their tips for saving money, in an attempt to build a community where users help eachother with finances. Unfortunately, there are either not enough users signed up for moneytrackin’, or no one is sharing tips. There are currently only a total of 24 tips available in english, from all users. Out of those 24, none are “local” tips for me.
So, for now, I won’t be continuing my use of MoneyTrackin’s services. If they make some upgrades and improvements, I may be back, but until then, I will continue to search for the lazy man’s ideal money management solution.
2.5/5
Do you have a really easy and useful budgeting tool that I haven’t seen? Do you use monetrackin’? What do you think of them?
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I used Quicken Delux for a couple years. It does everything you want offline, and connects online to download your transactions.
Not every bank or account has quicken feeds and some don’t have reliable, so eventually something will change and you will stop getting data from an account until the source or quicken fixes the process. If I remember right some of the feeds were not automated and had to be manually imported each week/month.
A year or two ago I came across Yodlee Moneycenter[ https://moneycenter.yodlee.com/ ]. Its like quicken, but online and they are on top of keeping your data feeds up. The data is accurate and near real time. The longest an account stopped updating was a few days. It has budget tools and other things, but I just plan my budget in excel and check balances with Yodlee. Yodlee is used by some banks, brokerages, etc as an extra service to clients, but i prefer using the latest version directly from Yodlee. moneycenter.yodlee.com, BofA My Portfolio, HSBC EasyView and Fidelity FullView…
I haven’t kept up with their new features, but they were working on getting bill pay built into their system, they have great bill reminders for all types of accounts. They also track many more types of accounts then Quicken.
Peppe, I checked out Yoodlee, and it’s great - much like a service I had already run across, mint.com - I tried it out, and was happy with the results. I would continue to use it, but it has one major flaw, which mint.com had as well - it can’t connect to my local bank’s online information, which removes my 3 most important accounts from the auto-update schedule.
I hope that someday yoodlee or mint.com gains access to my local bank, but until then, I probably won’t find a financial aggregation software that suites me.