People who are serious about their finances either develop their own processes and tracking methods or leverage the tools available to them on the web. With new resources popping up every day I wanted to gather a quick and dirty list of what is out there for you. Some of these I have heard of or played with in the past, others are new to me and I hope to be able to get some face time with them in the future and maybe post some reviews. All of these resources are online only or mainly online I did not include any software you would have to install on your computer, this should make each of these platform independent.
Anything marked with a big ole bag of money is going to cost you, everything else is free.
Research and Opinions
When you are looking for what is hot in personal finance, investing, or other money related topics you should stop by these sites to see what has boiled up out of the masses and become the cream of the crop.
Tip’d
Tip’d is a social bookmarking site which specializes in finance and money related topics. The spectrum can go anywhere from how to setup a budget, to how to short a stock. Each article submitted is voted on by members of the site, and eventually published on the main page if a sufficient number of votes were received. You will find many of my articles submitted to Tip’d if you ever want to help me out, sign up and give me a Tip.
PF Buzz
PF Buzz is similar to Tip’d in that it is a social network where user votes determine what does or does not make it to the front page. PF Buzz allows both voting up and down of posts where Tip’d will only allow you to Tip the article. PF Buzz is, in my opinion, underutilized as a resource so you may not find as much content as you do on Tip’d.
Moolanomy Answers
This is a new resource on horizon. Pinyo over at Moolanomy.com has created a Ask Yahoo! esque environment where users can submit questions to be answered by the community. The community can then vote on the answers to determine which answer is the best. If you have a question you want answered about finance or investing drop by and ask. I think this a great resource especially considering the caliber of people who tend to answer questions. I look forward to participating in this new community on both the question and the answer side of the equation.
Great Nexus
Great nexus takes the resources mentioned here, as well as many others and combines them all into one easy to access page. It includes feed streams from Tip’d, PF Buzz, and Moolanomy answers. In addition there is a lot of great finance blogs included in the personal finance section. You can also find information on Autos, Health, Life Hacking, Investing, Sports, and other topics.
Online Finance Management
Online Finance Management tools are those systems which attempt to take all aspects of your finances into consideration and aggregate the data into a single sign-on application giving you a dashboard view into your financial well being.
Yodlee Moneycenter
Yodlee is one of the oldest online finance management applications out there. They are same service used by Bank of America for their “account management.” I have used Yodlee for over a year and I really enjoy it. It has an easy to understand interface and works pretty well for what I need.
Mint
Mint is very similar to Yodlee in how it interacts with your accounts. It allows you to track your investments and balance accounts and provides the ability to budget among other options. I do not have much experience with Mint as I primarily utilize Yodlee and GNUCash for managing my funds.
Wesabe
Wesabe attempts to create a community around the types of account management you get from Mint and Yodlee. They offer the ability to track a similar range of accounts, however, they include a social component where you can get additional insights on your spending from the community.
Budgeting
In addition to the account aggregators mentioned above there are several sites which specialize specifically in budgeting.
Mvelopes.com
Mvelopes.com is an online personal finance management application which touts a proactive approach to spending management. This is what makes it more of a budgeting system than just an account aggregator. You will have to pay for the service and it runs around $130 for a 1 year plan.
Budget Pulse
Budget Pulse is an online financial management tool that specializes in managing your budget. I have not had a chance to play with Budget Pulse yet so I can’t recommend it, but it certainly looks promising and is something I am going to checkout when I have the time.
Rates and Banking
MoneyAisle
Money Aisle allows you to request bank accounts and CD’s from one central location and then have banks bid on your rates. This is similar to lending tree I think. I haven’t tried it out but it looks like a good way to get a decent rate.
BankRate
Bankrate is your one stop shop for the current rates on CD’s, mortgages, and savings account. They maintain a bank ranking system as well to give you an idea of how good the bank is behind that outrageous rate they are offering you.
Forums
Forums can be a great place to have discussions on various finance related topics. There are some pretty great forums out there here are just a few I tend to frequent. I won’t go into detail on each forum, they are very similar but each one contains unique discussion which you can learn from.
Bargaineering Forums
I have intentionally left blogs themselves off of this list, but certainly don’t forget the many great blogs that are out there as resources for your learning. Start out by checking the ones out in my Blog Roll <///=- over there somewhere. This list was not intended to be all inclusive so if you have something you want to add (moderate shameless self promotion allowed) please go right ahead.
Photo: (epicharmus)
{ 2 comments }
Nice list. I started my journey by reading many of these.
Thank you for the mention of BudgetPulse in your list of tools. There are a lot of excellent resources out there that people should take advantage of to help manage their finances.
BudgetPulse is free manual personal budgeting software that has zero security risks because we do not sync with any accounts. Our new revamped site is being released tomorrow and am glad to talk about it with anyone.
Craig Kessler
Marketing Director at BudgetPulse
[email protected]
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 3 trackbacks }