Mint, Wesabe, and Quicken have now let their Apps out of the bag. Here’s a rundown of each one.

Mint

Here’s how Mint describes what you can do with their app (full blog post here):

• Check your credit card balances from that seemingly endless checkout line.
• Monitor your gifts budget in real time, in case your loved ones are burning up the plastic at another mall.
• Stay on top of your finances while traveling. You’ll know if your paycheck cleared without navigating your relative’s dial up service.
• Watch your investment performance, distributions and dividends. Helpful in deciding when it’s okay to sell and realize those capital losses, sadly.

Word ‘Round the Web:

Another thing worth noting about security is that if you don’t have your iPhone passlock-protected, anyone can fire up the application and see the dollar value of each of your accounts. I’m a little surprised Mint hasn’t placed its own special passcode security system for those first using this app…The best you can do is simply log off in between use, but that’s not a good long-term solution.

(Josh Lowensohn for Webware/cnet)

“The app’s user interface is friendly, simple, and attractive…Mint’s functionality is limited, however; don’t expect to be able to add transactions on the fly or adjust your budget when you find yourself spending too much.”

(Jeff Phillips for MacWorld.com)

Quicken Online

Here’s how Quicken describes what you can do with their app (full post here):

• Save cash when you need cash: Using the iPhone’s GPS feature, you’ll be able to locate your own bank’s ATMs no matter where you are.
• Get a forward-looking view of your money: See what bills and other financial obligations are coming up before your next paycheck.
• Track transactions on the go: Enter that rent check before it clears or keep track of where that $50 from the ATM really went by categorizing it on-the-go.

Here’s their video (the only one of these three iPhone apps with a demo video!!):

Word ‘Round the Web:

By predicting your paychecks and recurring bills; Quicken products don’t just show you how much money you have in all of your combined accounts, they give you an idea of how much money you actually have to spend. Often, those can be two very different figures.

(David Weliver for MoneyUnder30.com)

Bottom line: Quicken offers a seamless, user-friendly app to track your money and to stay on track.

(Michelle Maltais for LA Times Technology)

Wesabe

Here’s how Wesabe describes what you can do with their app (full post here):

• Signing Up– If you do not have a Wesabe membership, you can create one right from your phone.
• Your Accounts– Any accounts you have on Wesabe will automatically appear on your phone…You can add a cash account from the phone by clicking the “+” button in the upper right of your Accounts list.
• Adding Transactions– Wesabe will use your phone’s location, and the Yahoo! Local API, to find the merchants nearest to where you are standing. Click the merchant name and you won’t have to type anything in but the amount.
• Graphing Your Spending– When looking at your Accounts list, turn your phone sideways to see a graph of your spending and earnings.

Word ‘Round the Web:

Ultimately, the choice of which app you’re going to use on the iPhone will come down to which service you use. But if you’re deciding which to sign up for and being able to edit your finances easily on a mobile device is important to you, than Wesabe may be a good choice.

(MG Siegler for TechCrunch)

Overall Thoughts:

For most people, the app they use depends on the site they already use–but that won’t be the case for everyone. Both word of these money management tools and of the power of mobile apps is spreading (Apple has an iPhone print ad, showcasing its apps–including Mint.com’s–that’s running in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal ). Considering when and how these money management tools are most useful, the smartphone app may soon be the primary way people manage their basic bank accounts.

So which one is the best for you if you’re new to online money management? Hard to say–while Mint.com has the cleanest and easiest user experience, Wesabe’s recent upgrade did wonders for its usability and overall look. It’s clear that Mint’s iPhone app (which was released Dec ‘08) offers fewer features than the other two (Quicken with its your-bank-ATM finder and Wesabe’s GPS business search, both released in the last couple weeks), and I think it’s ridiculous that the app lacks its own security. But of course Mint will roll out another version soon, and we can only speculate about what it will include.

Quicken’s App is more impressive than I expected; the projected income visualization looks sleek and the ATM finder golden. I think Wesabe’s app looks the best, but it will take some time to gain traction. In terms of popularity, the Quicken app is ranked highest (#4), Mint’s app is a close second (#6), and Wesabe is lagging (#49), but these numbers don’t indicate the quality of the app, nor whether the app is right for you.

I’ve seen in Mint and Wesabe forums many requests for a similar tool on the Android and Blackberry platforms, so for those of you drooping with sadness that you can’t use these tools yet, just have patience. Also, for anyone without a smart phone, each of these programs offers text message alerts and text finance updates, so unless you have only a land line, there’s a way for you to keep your finances in line, on the phone, anytime.

Still not sure if you want to use an online money management tool? Maybe a friend has mentioned Mint.com, but you want to know more before you get into it. Here are a few links to help you know “what’s up” in the OMMT world and help you decide which tool to use.
 

Overall Review of the Major Sites

This article by Daniel Begun for ComputerWorld thoroughly explains Mint, Geezeo, Wesabe, Quicken Online and Thrive and touches on Green Sherpa and Rudder.

These sites are no substitute for professional advice if your financial situation warrants it, nor are they even a replacement for more robust financial management applications such as Microsoft Money or Quicken. But they do offer a no-cost way to consolidate your financial information — including credit card accounts, investments and loans — into one easy-to-manage place.

If you just want the rundown comparison, check out the final page, with Begun’s conclusion and a chart comparing these sites (partially shown below).

Wesabe

Wesabe has a new look. Check out their blog post here for the details.

It has been a chance for us to clean up some of our mistakes, make the site easier to use all around, and introduce a new standard of design for our site. Where with the first design I was extremely controlling about every little piece, this time I told Magera, “Make something you would like” — and it turns out we all like what she likes.

Wesabe also released a new iPhone app which MG Siegler for WSJ/TechCrunch characterizes this way:

So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic.

Read the rest of the article here.

Mint

Mint’s new Financial Fitness was introduced yesterday “in beta to a group of current Mint.com users.” From their press release:

Financial Fitness defines five personal finance principles and specifies the steps everyone should take on a weekly, monthly and annual basis to put them into action. Integrated directly into users’ automated Mint.com service, which tracks their spending and investments every day, Financial Fitness recognizes and alerts users when they are on- or off-track in achieving financial health.

See this TechCrunch article for a description and go to this article from AppScout to get an invite to Financial Fitness (if there are any left).

This appears to be a very smart business move on Mint’s part, but–more importantly–this feature may help millions of people learn how to budget better. While no automated financial planner can tell you everything you should do to plan your finances, so many of the things we need to do with our budgets (pay taxes and bills on time, know our credit scores, plan for the end of the month, etc.) are things that everyone needs to do. Kudos to Mint for building what looks to be an easy and even–dare i say it–fun way to teach people how to use their money wisely. I can’t wait until I get to test it myself.

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.’ Mint, Wesabe, Quicken and Thrive all present your account information–and all a little differently–in order to help you ‘get the picture’ and understand how you spend your money.

All of these sites keep track of the names of different charges you may incur, and then automatically categorizes those purchases. For example, if you bought socks at H&M, these programs would automatically categorize the expense under “clothing.”

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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.


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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.”

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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 where you can figure out which day you made that huge purchase, and see when you’re most likely to spend money next week. Out of these four money management tools, Quicken Online has always taken the longest for my computer to load.

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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)

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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) I’ve categorized about 80% of my regular purchases which is most but not all of the purchases I can categorize.

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.

Both Mint and Quicken Online offer mobile alerts, and  for those of us who use text message for daily communication, these alerts make perfect sense. But even if you don’t text message frequently, think of the convenience of finding the following alerts in your pocket:

Daily Balance
While you can receive reports about your balance everyday of the week, I’ve chosen to receive texts just every Friday. This way, I start my weekend knowing exactly how much money I have available to me. Mint does a great job of this—not only do I get a text containing the balance of all my accounts (checking, savings, and credit card), but they also send the alerts right around 6:30pm—the normal time I switch from “work” mode to “weekend” mode. Whether I’m already out with friends or just getting out of my office chair, right then and there I can plan how much money I’ll spend over the weekend. It’s painless, quick, and extremely helpful.

Large Purchases
You can receive alerts when any of your accounts receives a large charge. Because my only large payments are for my student loans, I set my alerts for “any purchase larger than $60.” This helps me two ways. First, if I am charged for more than $60, I probably didn’t make that purchase, so I can quickly call my bank and report an erroneous charge or, worse, someone else using my account (which, fortunately, hasn’t happened). Second, because my student loan payments are higher than $60, I’ll know when the transfer has taken place. As an extra benefit, if I go out and charge more than $60 on any of my cards, I get a nice reminder to keep my plastic in my pocket for the rest of the night.

Bill Alerts
With Mint, you can schedule text alerts for credit card bills, and with Quicken, you can schedule alerts for any bills. These are great help, especially for those of us who are just learning to pay bills regularly. In Mint, you can choose to receive reminders from 1 day to 2 weeks in advance (in Quicken, you set reminders for any number of days before the bill).  I’ve found that I’m quicker to ‘get on the ball’ with my payments if I receive alerts 4 days in advance, but even if you schedule automatic bill payments, these texts are great reminders for when your account balance drops.

These tools offer other text alerts for when you go over your weekly budget, when the balance on any of your accounts drops too low, or if there are an unusually high amount of purchases in any category (ex: you could receive a text if you’ve spent more than $60 eating out in a week). You can even text Quicken to get your balance any time of the day and Mint will send alerts if your financial institution (bank or credit union) charges anything to your account or if the interest rate on your credit card or savings account changes. And, of course, all of these alerts can be scheduled as emails, too.

Whether or not you text regularly, these sorts of alerts can serve as little reminders to stay on top of your finances (they certainly do for me). Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst at a banking research firm says it well:

“Money is really, really important to us, but we really, really don’t like managing it.”

While it did take me about 15 minutes to get my account and text alerts set up in each of these programs, knowing if my card is charged a lot, receiving reminders for paying my bills, and starting my weekend off confident that I won’t overdraft are huge benefits that are entirely worth it. Whether you’re financially sitting pretty or just scraping by, these alerts will keep you in the know about your accounts and minimize the amount of work you need to put into managing your budget. If you sign up for text alerts through these or any other online money management tool and they help you out, let us know!

Here are a couple screenshots:

From Mint:

And from Quicken Online: