Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

Intuit has now made their Quicken Online service free, so I decided to give it a shot. I'm interested to see how I'm spending my money, especially with me being in the "real world," now. I need to keep myself away from buying cool things and focus on bigger things like houses, etc.

So after 10 minutes, I'm absolutely sold. This thing rocks. First thing is first, they let me use my same account I use when doing my taxes through Turbo Tax. While this seems like a "No duh!" situation, ya'll (I'm from the south now, so I can say it like that) know many companies make you sign up multiple times for no good reason. So that was a good start.

They then asked me to enter in my login info for my online banking or credit cards. After 2 minutes, they had all of my information tracked for all my finances. They had a couple transactions they couldn't figure out, but another couple minutes categorizing those and now I had a nice pie chart along with a summarization that I spent more than I made this month. While that wasn't cool to see, I guess I can't blame it on them. I've also got a breakdown of where I should look to reduce my costs.

This is a simple tool, but some of you may find it useful, especially if you've got a couple financial companies you're dealing with.

GJ said about 2 hours later

Sounds kinda like Yodlee of a few years ago. They may have been a decade ahead of their time, as the solution you describe above is pretty much what they offered, sans a killer app like Quicken. I'll have to check it out, even though I know what it's gonna tell me. :)
Marc said about 3 hours later

There's a bunch of these apps popping up for free online, which is likely why Intuit decided to make a free version as well.
GJ said about 6 hours later

Yeah. Yodlee is still around, and you can do Mint and a few others like this for free already.
Kristen said about 14 hours later

This is great Marc, thanks!! I'm glad to hear that you are doing this--with the economy the way it is, people in our generation need to rethink their standard of living and what it means to live within their means. Definitely start saving for a house now--we are going back to the old days of needing a significant down payment. If I had started saving for a down payment when I was your age, I would be in much better shape now. Thing is I thought that I didn't have the money at the time, but once I scrutinized my budget I realized that I had quite a bit to spare. Things like pedicures and side trips to Target are way over-rated! I guess in your case this would be side trips to newegg or bestbuy.
I'll try this thing and let you know how it works for me. Right now I use an excel spreadsheet that I created, but I'm a sucker for pie charts!
Geoff said about 17 hours later

This rocks Marc, thanks!
GJ said 1 day later

I was right. I knew what is was going to say and it said it. Like the rest of you, I should be spending a bit less. OK, kids, time to go hungry! :)
Geoff said 1 day later

Yeah mine is out of whack since I pay everything with my credit card (for points) and then pay back the card each month. So it is saying I spend XX amount on groceries and XX on credit...which really my payment to the credit is just paying for the groceries. But other than that, it's really spot on.
GJ said 1 day later

yeah, it needs tweaking, mine went nuts with the credit cards and has no idea how to deal with company and PTA expenses.