Every year there seems to be more and more online wealth trackers. I’ve used Mint since its early days. I’ve experimented with Personal Capital, Sigfig and a handful of others, but I always wind up wanting for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, each and every time I access one of these tools I spend the majority of my time troubleshooting account connection errors. I log in to Mint once every few months only to see a column of yellow caution alerts telling me that none of my accounts can be reached and that their balances haven’t been updated since the last time I logged in. Having spent quite a bit of time meticulously setting these accounts up, I’m generally enraged and frustrated with the service and most times just logout and check the balances myself.
Also, I have yet to find a service with a collection of tools that fits my needs. And I don’t have any ridiculously particular needs. A major need is a forecasting or “what if” graph. Being able to simply and easily see what an increase or decrease in allocations could do over time is something that I feel should be table stakes for these services, yet very few have them readily available. Tuition.io has something like this, but it uses a slider with preset values for some stupid reason, and it only works for college loans. Also they are going through some kind of pivot and my account was mysteriously shut down.
The budgeting and spend tracking aspects also tend to suck. For instance, Mint has access to my bank accounts and credit cards. I rarely spend cash, so Mint sees about 95% of my transactions, yet automatically categorizing charges seems to be well beyond its grasp. And God forbid it REMEMBERED the category I selected for a recurring charge, that would just be too easy! Long and short, budgets are useless if it takes you longer to categorize charges than it did to make them. Generally I’ll spend a few minutes trying to figure out why my local Speedway is called “JDH Enterprises” on my AMEX statement and then just quit.
Last, an easy way to export all of the data to a single spreadsheet so I can easily manipulate the data on my own would eliminate most of my complaints. Alas, that seems to be asking too much for most of the services I’ve tested.
Any suggestions for awesome money management tools that can tackle most of my issues would be very welcome.
Freed by 50 