“Where did all my money go”?
I’ve heard this phrase from my friends countless times.
In today’s economy, consumers desire increased visibility of their expenses. There are a few established companies like Intuit (Quicken) and Microsoft (Money) that offer robust consumer money management tools. These products tend to be very complex. For those non-accountants out there that desire to be more budget conscious, there are a handful of compelling web startups that provide users the ability to gain insight into their daily expenses.
This is an excellent post that I read this morning on TechCrunch -
Quicken Online Can’t Believe Mint Is Doing So Well; Sends Threatening Letter
Mint is a hot startup that currently has 934,000 registered users – I am one of them. I thought it would be interesting to share my experiences with the two online management tools that I currently use to stay on top of my finances. I do not use Quicken’s new online money management tool (two great budget tools is sufficient), but I’d be curious to get the thoughts of those who have tried the new Quicken.
I use Rudder in parallel to Mint (full disclosure – Meakem Becker is an investor in Rudder.com). While Rudder and Mint are often cited as competitors, I personally find the two services to be quite complementary. Once a user uploads all of his financial accounts onto the site, Rudder delivers a daily, semi-weekly, weekly (whatever the user chooses) e-mail that gives the user a complete view of his financial picture – account balances, recent transactions, etc. Some valuable things that Rudder accomplishes:
1). Account balances delivered daily to my e-mail – I no longer have to log into all of my financial accounts. Just think of how often you access your bank’s website to see your available balance.
2). A complete view of all of my recent transactions – in addition to seeing all recent transactions that you made, Rudder also shows their users the recent transactions that hit your account that maybe they did not make?? (fraudulent transaction). Rudder recently caught a fraudulent charge on my Discover Card that I may or may not have found without Rudder. My colleague, Alan Veeck, recently caught over $2,000 worth of air travel that was fraudulantly charged to his AMEX. Thanks to Rudder, this issue was quickly resolved.
3). Recently added widgets that give even more understanding to my financial picture – in addition to how much I have spent, Rudder uses a slick algorithm to determine “what’s left” for me to spend in a given month. The “bill pay” widget reminder is also very useful for forgetful people like me.
Mint is a service that I have actively used for a few weeks now. While Mint has been on my radar for quite some time, I had refused to use Mint until now because I was unable to upload my Citizens Bank checking account info. This problem has been fixed. Once you load all of your financial accounts onto the site, Mint works to categorize all of your expenses into pre-selected buckets. The engine is very smart; I estimate that Mint correctly categorized 95% of my expenses (it knows Giant Eagle is a “grocery” expense and Home Depot is a “home improvement” expense). A couple other cool things:
1). When Mint incorrectly categorizes an expense, a user can manually go into the expense and create a “rule”. The next time the same expense hits, Mint remembers the “rule” and places the expense in the correct category (no more manual inputs)
2). In categories that you choose to create monthly budgets for, Mint allows you to create larger, all-encompassing categories (food) or allows the user to see a more granular looks by sub-categorizing (fast food, groceries, restaurants). This is a very important feature that most other financial management sites have not figured out.
3). Mint goes beyond savings, checking, and credit card accounts. The service allows the user to upload 401k accounts, college loans, and even takes a 3rd party estimate of your current residence. In the end, you have a complete net worth estimate – great feature.
I encourage you to give these free products a try and begin to stay on top of your finances.
Comments (2)
Aaron, two interesting companies with similar services. They appear to be to personal finance as http://www.ennect.com is to eMarketing (disclaimer: that’s the company I work for
; and they’re part of the interesting trend toward aggregation of disparate finance/billing information to make personal finance more palatable to clients. I’d be interested from the VC perspective to see how the essentially pay-per-click business model works out for them: they’d need millions of users to begin making serious revenue.
..Alex.
Alex, Thanks for your comment and sorry it took me a week to reply. I believe the “free” model will work for these companies because the potential market is large and the value for the consumer is high. As of 3/16, Mint.com has hit 1M users http://tinyurl.com/ctlhqy and a recent report from Gartner suggests that 98% of people do not know of any new personal finance solution.
If you create a web service of extremely high value and are successful in marketing the product, I believe the free model works much better than a pay-for model. A pay-for model creates instant buyer tension and raises questions as to why someone would pay for a service when there are many competing products available for free.