• Home
• Checking Accounts – Everything You Need To Know

“Spending Time”: Visualize Your Finances

(UPDATE: Web-based personal finance has come a long way since I originally wrote this post. Beside Intuit acquiring Mint.com and discontinuing Quicken Online, both Thrive and Wesabe have grown significantly. Ah, such is the way with new frontiers…)

It’s easy to avoid thinking of our finances, and I think most of us do that because it’s simply a pain. Not only does a budget seem like a limit most of the time (‘I can only spend THIS much this week!’), but budgeting is often a too-abstract numbers game. Numbers are just symbols, and when ‘money’ is just a value that can change with a magic piece of plastic (‘charge it!’), the end of the month creeping up can induce nausea.

Online money management tools make visualization of money easier, lending a hand to those of us who “see” money rather than just abstractly imagine a ‘known quantity.’ All of these sites categorize your purchases. For example, if you bought socks at H&M, these tools would tag this purchase as “clothing.” But each of these tools present your purchase information in visually different ways. Here’s a look at how they help you “get the picture.”

—————————————————————————————————————————————
————————————————————————————————————–————————–
 

Mint

Mint’s pie chart of your finances is vividly-colored and well-animated. Each segment is a different “category” of spending. When you click on any individual segment, that portion becomes the “whole pie” and is further broken down into subcategories (see below). You can also use a bar graph (not shown here) to compare the amount you spend in each category to other people in cities around the US.


————————————————————————————————————–————————–
 

Wesabe

Wesabe has two visualization on the front page. One is a pie for your entire spending (above) and the other is a bar graph (below) that shows your “Spending vs. Earnings” each week. Out of all of these graphs, this one has helped me the most, making it quick and easy to see how much I spent in previous weeks, and putting up those red flags if “the blue bar is taller than the green bar.”

————————————————————————————————————–————————–
 

Quicken

Quicken’s pie chart shows information about each category of spending when you hover your cursor over the segment. When you click on the segment, a bar graph (not shown) displays a monthly breakdown of your spending in that category. Below is the Spending Money Outlook, a visualization of your balance over the course of your pay period. You can also shadow the previous month behind the current one to help you anticipate how much money you’ll need for next week. Out of these four money management tools, Quicken Online has always taken the longest for my computer to load.

————————————————————————————————————–————————–
 

Thrive

Thrive’s graph is a little more ‘conceptual’ and a little less spatially accurate, showing you smaller circles that represent different portions of your funds you spend in different categories within one larger circle–presumably your whole budget. When you hover over a segment, a title and dollar amount appears to the side (shown). While they’re not always easy to see, the icons representing different purchase categories are a nice touch, fitting with the theme of “approachability” for which Thrive, well, thrives. (Sorry)

————————————————————————————————————–————————–
————————————————————————————————————–————————–

While all of these visualizations are helpful, there’s one glaring problem with them all–they’re not accurate. This is for two reasons:

1) The automatic categorization doesn’t always work. I’ve used automatic categorization and manual categorization of my typical purchases to accurately label about 80% of my regular purchases. Unfortunately, the purchases likely to fall under these categories are the new ones, so I need to manually check that the purchases are correctly labeled each month.

2) The main shortcoming is that I can’t reclassify my ATM purchases easily. Only one of these tools (Mint) allows me to split up my ATM withdrawals into multiple purchases and classify these portions differently. The other tools condemn my ATM withdrawals to the “uncategorized” or “ATM withdrawal” category, and I can only reclassify them into one other category. For example, if I withdraw $40, spend $20 on dinner and pay my roommate the other $20 for the cable bill, I can’t split the payment classification accurately. Even with Mint, I can only do this online (and not via text message), so I rarely recategorize my spending. And because I use cash so often, these graphs accurately depict the amount I spend, but don’t accurately depict my spending by category.

All of these online money management tools offer great ways to ’see’ how you spend your money. And while you must pay attention to their accuracy, these tools make money management much easier, more graphical, and more intuitive.

Note: all graphics are property of the sites to which they’re attributed.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.