3 weeks with Geezeo.com
Geezeo.com is another one of a myriad of new personal finance sites that have popped up over the last year or two, along with competitors like Mint.com and Geezeo.com. We’ve already reviewed those other two services - now its time to take a look at Geezeo.
As part of keeping track of my family’s finances, my wife and I need a way to keep track of our finances online. Ideally we should be able to keep an eye all of our accounts, regardless of what institution they’re held at. We should be able to track balances, monitor big transactions, and be able check it from anywhere.
I signed up for Geezeo a few weeks ago, and here is what I found.
DESIGN:
The first thing you notice when you come to Geezeo.com is that they’ve got a clean design, with a whimsical piggy bank mascot. The page has a black border across the top with site links, and then your main account area and activities area resides at the middle and bottom of the page. When you first login you’ll be taken to a summary page that allows you to add accounts, view a list of your current accounts, spending trends graphs, spending and savings goals and your discussion groups. The design of the site is web 2.0 feeling, while not being over the top with lots of shiny buttons and other miscellaneous things you don’t need.
FUNCTIONALITY:
The first thing I did after creating my account was to try and setup my 8 checking, savings and mortgage accounts that I wanted to track. The credit card account setups went pretty smoothly except for my American Express card, which took several minutes to sign in. In fairness that was probably an issue with the American Express site, not Geezeo.
Then I set up my main checking, savings and money market accounts which are all at the same bank. A couple of the accounts are actually under different sign-in names, which normally isn’t an issue. I discovered, however, that at the time I signed up with Geezeo, they wouldn’t allow more than one sign-in name for any one bank. So for now I had to manually enter the one rogue account into their system (a huge pain, and something I wanted to avoid). I talked with Geezeo support, and they admit that this is a problem, but say that they are working on a fix, and multiple sign-ins for one bank should be available soon. (Support was very responsive and helpful by the way.)
My home mortgage account was easy to setup as well - and was compatible with automatic updates, which was a surprise. Both Buxfer.com and Mint.com choked on that one. It makes it much easier when the account information updates automatically.
The 401k account had to be manually set up - but I only update this information every quarter or so anyway, so it isn’t a huge deal.
Once all of our accounts were entered, we started looking around the site to see what some of the things we could do were. On their site they lay out some of the features of the software:
- Manage all your accounts (worked well for the most part)
- Mobile Access (not something we’re concerned with)
- Painless budgeting (A definite plus)
- Create Goals (strong suit of the site)
- Join Groups
- Learn from Others
Geezeo, it seems can do a lot of the things the other personal finance softwares do, with the added benefit of active forums and groups to give the site a more social network feel to it. People supporting other people in their finance goals.
So where to start? Well, first let’s look at viewing your accounts and editing tags.
When transactions are downloaded to Geezeo, they are automatically put into different categories so that you’re able to track your expenses, and run queries on different income and expense areas. Previously I had gone into my transaction data and tagged all of the transactions in categories that made sense. The tagging schema was pretty easy to use, although a little confusing at first. A few of the transactions weren’t tagged with the correct categories, but after making some corrections things looked pretty good.
When i looked a little further at my data I realized that somehow the system had entered duplicate transaction data for a couple of my accounts. Admittedly this may have been my fault when uploading the .ofx files for the accounts. When I looked, I couldn’t find any way to delete or remove duplicate entries. This was a huge issue, one I’m waiting on an answer about from support.
In my opinion one of the strong points of Geezeo is it’s budgeting tools. Once in the budget section you can choose different categories that you have previously tagged in your register, and setup a budget goal for each category. Each budget goal is represented on the page with a bright red button (if you’ve exceeded your goal) or by a bright green button if you’ve met or come under your goal. It is an effective way to keep on track, and see what areas you need help in.
Another area that Geezeo is strong in is the area of setting goals. Like the budgeting tool, you can set up savings or debt reduction goals. The tool is pretty flexible allowing you to set up a specific goal, and tell the system when it is met (for example: goal is met when account xyz has 1000 dollars in it). You can also see what other people are setting as their goals - and choose the same goals. That way you can track your progress against other users. I can see this being very helpful for those trying to get out of debt.
There are other tools that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of, mainly the social network aspect of Geezeo. I can see how the support group type social aspect of the site could be useful for a lot of folks as well, and I’m sure I’ll be checking that out more in the future.
With that said, here are a few pros and cons of Geezeo.com as I see it.
PROS:
- Simple to setup most new accounts.
- Eye pleasing design.
- Budgets: Ability to track and stay within a budget in one or multiple areas.
- Ability to track debt and savings goals: track what you owe, or what you want to save.
CONS:
- Problems in setting up accounts with some banks
- multiple logins not allowed with one bank
- limited options for investment and savings accounts: No simple way to setup 401k accounts or some other more advance savings options
- Clunky importing of data: Some data imports re-imported the same data as new transactions. No way to delete duplicates
CONCLUSION: So far in the three weeks I’ve been using Geezeo.com I have enjoyed using the software. The software gave us good feedback through its budgeting and goals tracking tools, and overall is a pleasure to use. On the negative side, the site still is in beta and sometimes it shows. From our clunky importing of .ofx data, to the problems with having multiple logins at the same bank, the experience left a little bit of a bad aftertase in my mouth.
I will recommend Geezeo.com to everyone out there with the caveat that you should be aware that the site is still in beta. Not everything will work as smooth as you might like. They are making improvements, however, and I expect things to get better.
If you’d like some other opinions, check out the further reviews of Geezeo.com below!
LINKS:
Geezeo.com
Geezeo.com - Money Confessions on Twitter
What money secrets do you keep? Geezeo Money Confessions
Chat, Chill, Pay the Bills
Geezeo - Check your bank account on the go
Geezeo.com - Social Networking & Personal Finance
Review - Geezeo Finance Management
3 weeks with Buxfer.com: A review
Buxfer.com is a new personal finance site that allows you to bring all your personal finance information together in one place, along the lines of competitors Mint.com, Geezeo.com. I recently signed up for the service so that I could weigh its advantages against the one I’m using right now, Mint.com.
We recently became more deeply involved in keeping track of my family’s finances, and we wanted to find a way to keep track of our finances online. Ideally we should be able to monitor all of our online accounts, regardless of what institution they’re held at. We should be able to track balances, monitor big transactions, and be able check it from anywhere.
In brushing up on what was out there I found a bunch of reviews of Buxfer.com. I signed up for the service so that I could weigh its advantages against another one I’ve used, and reviewed on this site, Mint.com.
DESIGN:
The first thing you notice when you come to Buxfer.com is their simple no frills design. The page has a white background, with links to accounts on the left, and tabs to different sections at the top. When you first login you’ll be taken to a summary page that lists some spending trends, account balances, and quick links to other sections of your account. Again, the design is pretty basic and clean, keeping the focus on what you’re doing here, balancing your checkbook. If you know what the gmail interface feels like, this is pretty similar. I don’t love the design, but it is definitely functional, and not ugly by any means.
FUNCTIONALITY:
In setting up my account for the first time, the first thing I did was bring together all of my account numbers, online account usernames and passwords, and anything else I would need to enter to get things going. In setting up my 8 accounts that I would be entering into Buxfer, the first two, both credit cards, went very smoothly. I entered my online user information for those banks and the information was imported without too much trouble.
I then moved onto adding my checking, savings, money market and 401k accounts. This is where things started to get a bit trickier. Four of my accounts are at a local bank here in Minnesota, and for whatever reason Buxfer had never heard of the bank, and is not compatible with their online services. This is a huge problem for me because most of my main bank accounts are located at this bank. In setting up online services at mint.com, I was able to setup this bank without too many problems (some slight login issues). Not so at Buxfer. Because of this, my main spending accounts would not be able to update transaction data without my manual intervention.
My other online accounts for our mortgage and 401k accounts proved not to be compatible with automatic updates either, and we had to manually enter them as well. This isn’t as much of an issue for me as transactions with these accounts are less frequent and easily entered into the system.
Once all of our accounts were entered, we started looking around the site to see what some of the things we could do were. In their invitation email they lay out some of the features of the software:
- Automatically download transactions from your bank or credit card (mixed results for us)
- Analyze and visualize where you spend your money (basic but effective)
- Control your spending with budgets and mobile alerts (Great tool for controlling spending)
- Track shared expenses and I-O-Us (e.g., rent, groceries with room-mates) (one of the strong suits of the software)
- Transfer money online and settle your debts (we didn’t use this)
- Access specialized iPhone / Blackberry interfaces “on-the-go” from your mobile device (I don’t have one of these fancy phones!)
These are all things that Buxfer can do if you really delve into it. The main area of concern that I had was in tracking my family’s expenses. To do that, I went to the “Analysis” tab of the software.
Previously I had gone into my transaction data and tagged all of the transactions in categories that made sense. The tagging schema was easy to use, and once I set up my own categories it was relatively easy to setup future transactions to go into the correct categories.
The analysis tab shows you quickly in a couple of different ways where your money is coming from, and where it is going.
Again, the features are basic, but effective. You can break down your income and expenses into the different categories, find out where your biggest expense categories are, and find places to cut down. If you find that your tags aren’t quite specific enough to allow this, you can modify your tags or add new ones at any time.
Once you have checked out the analysis tab you may want to try and set up a budget so that you’re not overspending in areas you may have in the past. To set up a budget item is very simple - you just specify the budget area you want to set up a limit for, the amount you want to spend, and then specify keywords and tags that should be included in your budget. Then you tell it what time period (1 month for example) you want to track, and it starts that budget item to tracking. Again, simple yet effective.
PROS:
- Simple to setup new accounts.
- Simple Gmail-like design: No overpowering colors or over the top Web 2.0 schemes.
- Simple yet effective tabs structure: They keep it simple, but the options they give you are very useful.
- Useful graphs and charts: Charts that give you good, useful information.
- Balance and spending alerts: keeps you up to date on what money is coming in, or out.
- Budgets: Ability to track and stay within a budget in one or multiple areas.
- Ability to track spending for groups: track what you owe, or what others owe you. Also gives you ways to pay them.
CONS:
- Problems in setting up accounts with some banks
- limited options for investment and savings accounts: No simple way to setup 401k accounts or some other more advance savings options
- Clunky importing of data: Some data imports re-imported the same data as new transactions.
CONCLUSION: So far in the three weeks I’ve been using Buxfer.com I have enjoyed using the software. The software gave us good feedback as to problem areas in our accounts, as well as being a simple and straight forward way to keep tabs on our spending. Granted, the software gave us fits in trying to setup our main spending accounts (which we never really did resolve), but they are making updates all the time and hopefully these issues will be worked out by the developers without too much delay.
I will recommend Buxfer.com to those of you out there who are able to get the software up and running with your accounts. Once you’ve got things loaded, and your accounts download automatically, it should be much more of a joy to use. As for me, I’ll be sticking to mint.com for my online finance manager as it has been a bit more of a “set it and forget it” type option.
Let us know what finance manager you use in our poll below!
If you’d like some other opinions, check out the further reviews of Buxfer.com below!
LINKS:
Buxfer.com - a Quicken for 20 somethings
Buxfer Review
Buxfer - Track your shared expenses
Buxfer uses amazon payments to help friends settle debts
Buxfer: another web 2.o personal finance site
Money Management Made Simple - Enveloping
A friend from church told us about a software this week that you can use to create an easy budgeting system at home. It’s simply called “Budget” and it uses the tried and true “envelope system” of budgeting to keep you on track. From the website:
Money Management, Made Simple
Tired of living payday to payday? Can’t get out of debt? Try a better way to manage your bank account(s). Budget is based on the tried and true envelope method of budgeting. It’s a much easier way to see where your money is, where it’s needed, and where it went.
Some of the features include:
- Variable Pays: Handles pays that vary in frequency and amount.
- QIF Import: Convert data from other applications, or download your transactions from a bank.
- Bank Account Management: Record checks, debits, and deposits, and easily balance your checkbook.
- Define Pay Sources: Set up your income to automatically distribute funds to various envelopes.
- Multiple Bank Accounts: Define as many bank accounts as you need.
- Credit Cards: Track your credit card spending, and stay out of debt.
I haven’t personally used the software as of yet, but my friends have and they seem to like it quite a bit. Give it a try - there is a 30 day free trial!
LINKS:
Budget Software
3 weeks with Mint.com
Since I recently became more deeply involved in keeping track of my family’s finances (because of starting this blog), I decided that it would be nice to find a way to keep track of our finances online. Ideally we should be able to monitor all of our online accounts, regardless of what institution they’re held at. We should be able to track balances, monitor big transactions, and be able check it from anywhere.
In brushing up on what was out there I found a bunch of reviews of a relatively new online software for monitoring your personal finances from mint.com. It is billed as being the, “freshest, most intelligent way for you to manage your money online”. It is a free product (I like free), and from their own descriptions of the software, it should be “virtually effortless” to use their software. After viewing a few of the alternatives, I decided to give Mint.com a chance.
DESIGN:
The first thing you notice when you come to Mint.com is their beautiful, refreshing design. It has a very Web 2.0 feel to it, and the color scheme in various hues of green makes you feel like you’ll be rolling in it (green) very soon! It is very pleasing to the eye, and while that may seem to be a small thing to some, in my opinion its something that can keep people coming back, or keep them from coming back. In this case their design is a definite plus.
FUNCTIONALITY:
In setting up my account for the first time, the first thing I did was bring together all of my account numbers, online account usernames and passwords, and anything else I thought I might need to set up my accounts with Mint. I honestly didn’t know how much information they were going to need, so I got it all.
They brag on their website, “With Mint, you can be fully up and running in less than five minutes”. I didn’t find that to be fully the case in my instance, but I don’t think my difficulties setting up the software were in any way representative. Most of our accounts (the ones with major national banks) were very easy to set up. We just inputted our usernames and passwords for those accounts, and within a minute or two Mint.com had logged in, downloaded account and transaction information, and set us up ready to go. Two of my accounts with our local bank had some difficulties in setting up the usersnames and passwords of our online accounts, but those were more problems with out local bank, and not mint.com. So if all of our accounts had been with large national banks I think we honestly could have been ready to go in LESS than 5 minutes. It was a very smooth and pain free setup process.
Once you enter all of your information and your transactions are downloaded, you can begin using the software. The website has 5 main tabs that you can use to track your finances. First, the “overview” tab allows you to get a broad overview of your finances, what your balances are, a brief look at your budget (that you setup elsewhere), alerts for large deposits, withdrawls or account balances, as well as ways that you can save money. There is quite a bit of information on that main page, but a lot of it is stuff you’ll need to setup elsewhere in the software. I found the alerts section on the homepage especially helpful because it allowed me to see when my balances were getting low, when we spent large amounts of money on something, or if certain deposits had gone through. It even allows you to set up an alert to notify you if there are any “ususual spending” in your accounts, which means that you’ve spent more in a certain category than usual.
The second tab is the “transactions” tab. This tab allows you to view all of your downloaded transaction information for all of your accounts. You can view the items either by individual account, or with all of the accounts together. The register on the page will show the merchant name, the category of the expense, the amount and the date of the transaction.
I did find that alot of the transactions that I downloaded were either not categorized by the correct merchant name, or the correct category. This is somewhat understandable as not all of the merchant names were very recognizable, but at times the software would take a merchant name, and transpose it to mean something else. Then, it would assign an incorrect category based on the incorrect name. This is a minor quibble with the software as this problem was easily fixed when found just by clicking on the category or merchant name, and making the necessary changes. It was a pretty prevalent problem, however, and hopefully one they’ll be able to improve in the future. You are also able to add notes to each transaction in case the item needs further attention.
The third tab is the “spending trends” tab. When you click on this tab the page fills up with charts and graphs. One is called “Where you spend” and it details all of the categories your expenses are going to. For me this was a very useful tab because it allowed us to figure out just how much money we were spending on eating out. We knew we were spending a lot, but we had just never figured out exactly how much. When we saw on the spending trends page just how much that figure was, we were horrified to say the least.
The second part of the page is called “spend space” and it allows you to compare your expenses against those of other people in your area, or across the country. Once again we found this very useful because sometimes you may find out how much you’re spending in a certain area, but you think that it is within the bounds of a reasonable expenditure. By viewing this section we found that our expenses for dining out where well above the average for our location, as well as nationally. Very eye-opening.
The fourth tab is called “ways to save”. This page will look at your accounts, and figure out ways that you can save money. For us it found that we had a large amount of money stashed in a low interest bearing money market account. It suggested that we move that money to a high yield online savings account, and as a result we would gain about $800 in interest for the year. Not a bad idea. It also suggested credit cards with lower interest rates, and checking accounts with higher interest. In all it gave us ways to save about $930 for the year. We were already planning on moving our money to the high-yield savings account, so that savings of $800 in additional interest is one that we will be enjoying.
The final tab is the “accounts” tab. This is the tab where you can add or remove accounts and keep track of all your logins and account numbers. Also, when you login to your account you can come to this page and ask the software to “update” all of your accounts by downloading new transaction information. It does this already automatically, but it may be a day or so behind sometimes so it doesn’t hurt to do a forced refresh.
So, with that said, here are some of the pros and cons that I found when using the software
PROS:
- Ease of setup and use: easy to setup, and maintain your accounts
- Pleasing design: Nice web 2.o design with pleasing colors
- Simple yet effective tabs structure: They keep it simple, but the options they give you are very useful
- Useful graphs and charts: Nice looking charts that give you eye-opening information
- Balance and spending alerts: keeps you up to date on what money is coming in, or out.
- Ways to save alerts: Make sure you’re getting the most out of your accounts that you have.
CONS:
- Strange renaming of merchants: One restaurant was renamed from Pompeii’s Grotto to Pomp Games (or something else strange)
- Strange category choices: Sometimes the software will categorize an expense under a random category that doesn’t make sense
- limited options for investment and savings accounts: No way to setup 401k accounts or some other more advance savings options
- Recurring login issues with one bank account(not mint.com’s fault)
- Silly “ways to save suggestions”: Sometimes it gives you suggestions to switch accounts for insignificant savings, or tells you to switch to an account with the same bank for little or no savings
CONCLUSION: So far in the three weeks I’ve been using Mint.com I have been reasonably impressed. The software has brought to light some things that we need to change, as well as being a simple and straight forward way to keep tabs on our main spending accounts. Granted, the software didn’t allow us to enter our 401k accounts, and we did have a few login issues with one of our bank accounts, but the software is also free, and is still in beta. They are making updates all the time and I expect a lot of these issues will be ironed out in the near future.
I will happily recommend Mint.com as a nice basic personal finance manager. It is simple to setup, easy to use, and is a great way to keep track of your accounts while you’re out of town. The small issues we had with the software were easily overcome by all the useful things it can do. While we won’t stop using our Microsoft Money account on our home desktop, we’ll be using this as a nice additional tool that we can use when we’re on the go.
So go out and sign up for an account today!
If you’re still not convinced, check out the further reviews of mint.com below!
LINKS:
Mint.com
NYTimes Mint.com review
Blogger Mint.com Review
Blogger Mint.com Review 2
Blogger Mint.com Review 3
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