Personal Finance Sites

This is the best review we found: it evaluates and compares five financial management sites. According to reviewer Don Reisinger, Buxfer, Geezeo and Wesabe are suitable mainly for beginners who want basic… information about their financial situation. Buxfer's primary strength is its simplicity, while Wesabe shines at providing goals and tips for saving money. Wesabe also offers an online community, as does Geezeo, which wins praise for its ease of use. Mint gets slightly higher marks, but it "doesn't provide the kind of depth that you would expect from a full-featured money management tool." Quicken Online is "the most capable finance tracking software I used," says Reisinger.

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This comparative review is credible and useful, since it is based on hands-on testing and includes both desktop and web-based personal finance applications. Currey tries out various websites, including… Mint, Wesabe and Quicken Online, as well as the desktop financial software packages Money Plus and Quicken Deluxe 2009. He narrows the field to five finalists, and evaluates each based on four criteria: security, ease of use, features and value. Currey gives Wesabe high scores for security and value, but lower ones for features and ease of use. Mint gets high scores for ease of use and value, while Quicken Online ends up with a slightly higher score.

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This excellent comparative review provides detailed looks at free sites Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo and Buxfer. Of these, Mint is the favorite of author Stacy Rapacon, who likes the site's ability to track all… your accounts, link directly to over 7,500 U.S. financial institutions and offer personalized savings tips and generate charts and graphs to give users a big-picture view of their financial situation. The strength of Geezeo and Wesabe, Rapacon says, lies in their online communities, where users "support, inspire and advise one another." Buxfer specializes in group budgeting, which is useful for roommates, or for tracking payments and expenses on a group vacation.

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This review evaluates three financial services websites: Mint, Billeo and Rudder. Editor Errol Pierre-Louis does not rank them, but identifies the most useful features of each one, and provides links to… full reviews of all three. Mint is a four-star Editors' Choice pick; editors like its ease of use and ability to track many types of accounts and generate reports that enable the user to see how money is being spent and where savings may be possible.

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Lauren Fairbanks tries three financial management sites and she compares them and lists their pros and cons. Fairbanks concludes that Mint.com "offers the most comprehensive package with more useful graphs… and trackers." Wesabe offers more basic financial management tools, but also provides an online community. Buxfer's key feature is the ability to keep track of and pay IOU's from friends and acquaintances.

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This review compares Mint and Yodlee MoneyCenter and pronounces Yodlee MoneyCenter "the most effective site." The reviewers say that if consumers are worried about the security of their data with Yodlee… MoneyCenter, they should know that Yodlee provides back-end services for major financial institutions. The reviewers also mention Wesabe and Geezeo and acknowledge that they provide a social network, something neither Yodlee MoneyCenter nor Mint does. The review was written before Mint added the ability to track investment accounts, however, and it criticizes Mint's inability to do this.

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This is not so much a review as it is a discussion of personal finance websites. Amy Hoak remarks that Quicken Online may appeal to those who already use Intuit's TurboTax, since they'll be able to import… data from the 2008 tax year. Mint.com is for people who don't want to spend much time dealing with their financial affairs. Wesabe and Geezeo offer online communities, and Mvelopes has been around since 2004, so "has stood the test of time." Hoak also gives advice to prospective users on how to protect their data, whether it's stored on their home computer or a website's server.

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This review by columnist Ron Lieber is useful mainly for the perspective it provides on what consumers should expect when they use a financial accounting website for the first time. Leiber discusses in… detail only Mint, simply because this was the only site that was able to access and download transactions from his credit card accounts. None of the others he tried -- Wesabe, Quicken Online, Rudder and Geezeo -- could access all of his accounts. Lieber says that difficulty loading accounts and re-categorizing transactions onto any of the financial accounting websites, including Mint, is par for the course, but worth the time.

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This article describes, but does not compare or rank, online finance software that is aimed at "people in their 20s and 30s who aren't very financially savvy but want to learn how to be." Joseph De Avila… discusses Mint, Rudder and Thrive, as well as the online finance software tools now provided by some banks. According to De Avila, "Financial-service sites are increasingly confident that young people -- those raised on Facebook and iTunes -- will be drawn to their free, simple web-based money-management applications." The article also discusses how the recession is affecting those who use financial services sites. For example, more Mint users have been using the Ways to Save feature and more Thrive users are seeking advice on how to save money.

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BeingFrugal.net is a blog maintained by a woman who admits she is not an expert, just someone who wanted to get out of debt. She describes how PearBudget works, and praises both its simplicity and its… customer support. She concludes that PearBudget is a good choice for "those who are new to budgeting, or those who just want a really simple application that tracks their spending against their budget, without unnecessary bells and whistles."

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This U.K. site gives Wesabe a 2008 Gold Award. Reviewer David Crookes gives Wesabe five out of five stars in four areas: security, flexibility, features and ease of use. He notes that Wesabe has somewhat of… a U.S. bias since it is a U.S. company, but does support most U.K. financial institutions. Although he says the site's FAQ section could be improved, overall he praises Wesabe for being "both powerful and versatile."

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