My 20-something niece has gotten herself into money problems again. Nothing major, just the typical “I thought that if my debit card worked it meant I had money!” kind of thing.
I seem to remember reading a while back about a few websites that integrated with your bank and let you set up budgets/reminders/etc and help you keep a real-time look at where you’re spending your money. Alerts would be good, too. Like “Niece, you’re down to $5 in your checking account, do you really want to be going to Target again?”
Of course, I can’t find them. Anyone?
Oh, she has an iPhone, so if there’s anything that has an iPhone interface that’d be even better!
Second the recommendation of Mint.com. I don’t use it (as I’ve been using Quicken for a long time) but have heard good things about it and it does have an iPhone app.
Both of those look useful. I’d like to keep better track of my finances but am lazy. If, as Mint claims, all you have to do is give them your account details and they do all the work that would be fantastic!
They appear to only be available for the US. Does anyone have experience with them in the UK/are there any recommended UK versions?
My concern would be giving out all of my financial data. How do these firms make money?
The problem with mint is that you can’t do any expense forecasting. So say you know that you have $500 in the bank, but will need to pay a $300 phone bill. You cannot get mit to show you that you really only have $200 to spend.
I used mvelopes for a while but found it way confusing. But it does let you allocate for planned spending in a way that mint doesn’t.
I think mint is greatgreat at giving you an automated and trended view of your past. And has good, mobile alerts. (So it will email and tell you, that you have only $5 left in your account.)
But for true budgeting & planning it isn’t really great.
I have no personal experience of using it, but I believe NatWest (and possibly Lloyds) offer a service where they text you your balance after a purchase, for a small monthly fee. I find the general service from NatWest excellent, FWIW.
Quicken now has a free online service - they’re trying to take on the Mint people, and it’s got an iphone app.
As an aside, Quicken / Intuit is really pissing off their loyal desktop customers over this, as the online app doesn’t presently offer any way to connect to the desktop data (as in, you enter a transaction on the fly, then it eventually winds up on the desktop where all your years of data lives). For people who are already Quicken customers, their online tool is therefore of zero use.