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Here's advertising for an interesting site:
mint.com. It's a completely free site that lets you consolidate a lot of financial information into one place, so you can easily view your current financial status. Kinda like an online Quicken. But with AJAX (you know, smooth looking browser action stuff).
Yes, trusting random online website with your financial data, bank access passwords, etc, is a tad bit questionable, but they've been around for over a year, and it looks like there hasn't been any particular bad press... They also say:
"We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information.
That means no one at Mint, and no potential hackers of Mint.com, can access your banking credentials."
I'm not sure how they accomplish that exactly - I did read somewhere that they used a trusted third party system that does all the communication and such.
Lastly, I find it awesome and useful because:
1) It lets me set up alerts. And it means there's an automated system checking up on my account activity and warning me if suspicious stuff happens. At the moment, Discover card and American Express has been known to call me when there's an unusual purchase (like when I bought my MacBook Pro). This will cover all of my accounts.
2) I can start budgeting. And it means I can access my financial information in a read-only fashion from anywhere, so it's not stored on my laptop or some physical, easily stolen object.
mint.com. It's a completely free site that lets you consolidate a lot of financial information into one place, so you can easily view your current financial status. Kinda like an online Quicken. But with AJAX (you know, smooth looking browser action stuff).
Yes, trusting random online website with your financial data, bank access passwords, etc, is a tad bit questionable, but they've been around for over a year, and it looks like there hasn't been any particular bad press... They also say:
"We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information.
That means no one at Mint, and no potential hackers of Mint.com, can access your banking credentials."
I'm not sure how they accomplish that exactly - I did read somewhere that they used a trusted third party system that does all the communication and such.
Lastly, I find it awesome and useful because:
1) It lets me set up alerts. And it means there's an automated system checking up on my account activity and warning me if suspicious stuff happens. At the moment, Discover card and American Express has been known to call me when there's an unusual purchase (like when I bought my MacBook Pro). This will cover all of my accounts.
2) I can start budgeting. And it means I can access my financial information in a read-only fashion from anywhere, so it's not stored on my laptop or some physical, easily stolen object.
