Cheaper Cheap-Skate

Last weekend, we had a group of folks over to our house to watch the wedding video, see the wedding pictures, eat delicious, home-made Chinese food (courtesy of Erika's Taiwanese friend), and generally engage in liquid-fueled debauchery.

I was chatting with Melissa early in the evening about exciting subjects like budgeting, finding out where we were spending all of our money, how much housing prices have fallen, etc. etc. We started talking about websites that we used to track our expenditures and she introduced me to Mint.com, a site were you can load up all of your savings, checking, and investment accounts and track your expenditures, create budgets for different categories, etc. Think of it like Quicken, only it's free and it's web-based.

I had used a competitor of theirs called wesabe.com and had played around with it for a few days before deciding it was too much work and my general concerns for allowing a third party access to all of my account data plus the username and passwords to those accounts. I mean, I should be concerned about these things, considering my job is to protect financial information at a bank!

So Sunday, I dove in a little deeper to try to understand the security behind these sites and started trying to guage how usable the sites were. Throughout the past week, I've done more and more investigative work and I feel pretty comfortable with both sites. Wesabe.com actually stores the authentication data on the user's computer and does not store it at the site if you don't want it to (which I don't). Mint.com uses a third-party - Yodlee, which is an industry-wide service company used by banks and subject to banking regulations - to store this information. Security-wise, Wesabe.com wins.

Next, I started messing with the functionality of the sites. The big difference is that Mint has a very clean, easy-to use site that automatically labels your transactions (if it can figure it out, as it did for most of mine) and, the big difference, allows you to connect to your investment sites to track those - including a neat chart area that shows your performance versus the indexes. Wesabe has most of the same features, but I understand that it doesn't immediately label your transactions (I can't remember, I set it up a while back), although it does remember how you label certain items so that it minimizes the amount of input and changes required. The interface is not nearly as clean, however, and - the big problem - doesn't really track your investments. It's a "Wesabe Labs" feature that's bare-bones and doesn't have many sites you can connect to. Mint wins here.

Most other features like budgeting, reporting/charts, etc. are pretty much the same. Wesabe has a social networking feature that is debatable in value (I don't think I would ever use that), has pretty good help forums, and is less advertising geared. Mint offers a lot of "offers" that are paid for by the company offering the services, but I know a thing or two about finances, so I wouldn't look at those regardless. But I guess in this way Wesabe wins.

So Wesabe wins 2 out of 3, but until they clean up their interface and offer more options for tracking my investments, I think I'll stick to Mint. But I will try to use both for a while to see if any other deal breakers pop up.

J. Riley, as if I didn't already think about finances enough. Erika just *loves* that I'm tracking every expense now :o|