Internet Provides Easy, Secure Online Money Management

Online money management is like a turbo charge for your checkbook, giving you up-to-the minute insight into your financial life. Whether finding ways to save a few bucks, socking away cash for retirement or sticking to a budget, services such as Mint, Wesabe and Quicken Online, are changing the way people manage money.

Banks have also moved money management online and remain the only way to actually transfer money among your financial accounts. Together these web, mobile and text-based money tools help you move beyond the checkbook register and into the realm of true financial freedom.

Mint
Mint is one of several new companies offering incredible tools to manage your money online -- for free. With a brief (under five minute) set up, Mint can access your various financial accounts including banks, credit cards, and investment accounts to give you an accurate picture of your financial worth.

But, Mint doesn’t stop there. They also have tools to help you budget, save and analyze your spending. Mint connects securely to more than 5,000 banking institutions and downloads daily account information. It then automatically categorizes your spending such as on gas, groceries, rent, restaurants, etc., to give you a clear picture of what money is coming in and what is going out.

Mint's primary feature that sets it apart from its competitors is that it analyzes your spending habits to provide you customized offers that could save you significant money. For example, perhaps you are spending more on your cell phone bill than you need to be or you have a chunk of change sitting in a no-interest account that could be put to work in a high-interest rate account from another bank. These helpful ads are how Mint stays free for users -- a small price to pay.

Mint isn't for moving money -- that's what your bank's site is for. What Mint does is help you make more since of your spending and find ways to make your money work for you.

Another useful, and addictive, feature of online money managers like Mint are detailed graphing abilities to let you truly see how big a chunk of your financial pie is going to gas or rent or Blockbuster. Mint has a feature called SpendSpace that lets you see how your spending or stock performance compares with others. Do you spend more or less than others at coffeeshops? Grocery stores?

Want to stay on top of your spending? Mint's budget tools let you set goals and track your spending. It will even send you an email or text message when you go over budget if you want. You can also stay ahead of hidden fees from your bank or stock broker, saving you lots of money over time.

Whether you sign up or not, Mint is a wealth of financial education via its blog, which includes Motley Fool columns, Q&A's with finance experts and instructive stories of what not to do with your money.

Wesabe
If you want to skip the money-saving offers and prefer learning saving tips from the "hive," then Wesabe is your money management solution. A social network/online money manager, Wesabe offers many of the features of Mint such as intuitive expense tracking and useful graphs.

Wesabe's unique feature is its network of other savers who help provide tips to save you money or share their own stories of financial success or trouble. Also, while your personal data is anonymous, Wesabe does compile information about trends in spending and saving among its users. This information gives you information about how your habits compare to others.
Unlike Mint which requires you to provide passwords to automatically update your financial data, Wesabe has the option to let you control how and when you upload your data by downloading it directly from your bank to your computer and then uploading it to Wesabe yourself as a Quicken or Microsoft Money file, if you prefer. They also recently added an automated uploader for select banks and credit cards for those who are ready to trust an online money manager with more secure data. The delay on adding the service is because of Wesabe’s commitment to not using third-party services to manage data, as they promise in their Data Bill of Rights.

Wesabe's budgeting capabilities are less robust than Mint's, but still allow you to set spending targets and quickly see when you meet or exceed them. It does not, however, send you alerts like Mint, but Wesabe can be updated via mobile or iPhone.

Wesabe is also very customizable in its use of tags rather than categories to track spending. While the structure is a bit cumbersome, it does have a lot of flexibility once you get the hang of things, allowing you to get really in depth with tracking spending.

Wesabe also has a blog that you can access without signing up to learn more about the updates coming to the site and other helpful financial info.

Another plus for Wesabe is that it is open to improvement via its Make Wesabe Better group where it solicits ideas from its users to make the site more useful.

Wesabe and Mint aren't the only two kids on the financial block, YodleeMoneycenter, Geezeo, Buxfer and the now free Intuit's Quicken Online are other similar offerings competing for a piece of the online money monitoring pie. Each has their pros and cons, but with easy, and free, sign-ups you can test-drive several and find one that works for you.

A Word About Security
Security remains a major stumbling block for some people moving to one of these online money management sites. Each site makes strong statements regarding the security of your financial information, including how they do not store your financial data and how their systems are the same or similar to ones your bank uses.

For those that are still nervous, Wesabe offers manual upload options, but you sacrifice up-to-minute information and some ease of use.

For those who can get over the psychological hurdle of trusting the sites, they can be quite useful. For those who can’t, there is always your checkbook or Excel spreadsheet.

Banks Still Strong
Banks remain the only source for true money management in terms of transferring funds among accounts, but they have greatly increased the options for doing it online and by mobile device. Requirements, fees and functionality vary greatly by bank, but most provide some form of online viewing of transactions, transfers among accounts and downloading of information for use by other programs such as Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken, among others.

Paypal, Amazon Payments and Revolution Money Exchange are attempting to shift some of the banks business their way offering easy and secure ways to transfer money to individuals and businesses.

Banks have also gotten into the online money management service as well with offerings such as Bank of America's My Portfolio and Wells Fargo's My Spending Report.

When it comes to managing your money, you don't have to settle for old-fashioned pen and paper or even spreadsheets to make it happen. Today's offerings are intuitive, easy, and helpful, bringing together the best of collective wisdom, number crunching, and security. It just makes sense!

Chris McGinn, writer for Digital Landing