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.