One site for all your finances
I have a lot of different financial sites to keep track. I thought there must be a way to enter all the stocks, mutual funds, accounts and their interest rates as well as regular deposits or purchases I make so I could track the growth of my portfolio in one place. I searched around for a while but found nothing, which was disappointing. When I want to see where I’m at financially, I have to check the balances of my 401(k), Roth IRAs (my wife’s and mine), our mutual fund, a long term savings account with HSBC, our regular savings account, our checking accounts and the stocks in my employee purchase program. It would be so much more convenient to aggregate all that information into one place instead of having to login to a dozen different ones, but I gave up on it.
Then I ran across an old blog entry on Get Rich Slowly which talked about a site I had never heard of before called Yodlee that provided the exact service I described above (and more). I’m now in love with Yodlee. You can compute your net worth, see charts of your spending separated out into categories, calculate the overall growth (or decline) of your portfolio and it even shows you how your investments are distributed into stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
My main concern with using the service was that you have to provide all the passwords to your accounts. The idea of having them stored at one site was scary because if that site were hacked, all heck would break loose. However, the benefits I get from Yodlee outweigh my concerns, and the fact that I can set up alerts so I’ll be notified if something fishy happens (like a large withdrawal) put my concerns at rest. Yodlee is also a trusted company whose aggregation service is used by Bank of America, HSBC, Bank One and Yahoo.
It’s a free service, which is a big plus, and comes highly recommended by everyone I’ve heard of that uses it. Stop buying crap did a very detailed review of the service, it is loved by Chuck MacDougal who writes a finance blog, and even the folks at Ask Metafilter sing its praises.
I didn’t realize how popular it was until I saw that a Yodlee representative had offered to answer questions about Yodlee on the fatwallet forums and it became such a popular thread (55 pages of discussion) that Yodlee opened up their own forums to answer questions from all of their users.
I love being able to calculate my net worth in seconds, to see the growth of my portfolio over time and being able to get an overall picture of all of my financial accounts. Yodlee is one of most useful sites I’ve come across in a long while.
That does look nifty, but I have to admit I’m a little squeamish about giving up my passwords for financial sites. Losing my net worth would be “menos eficaz.”
Understood. You have to decide if the benefit is worth the risk.
I gave in and added most of my various accounts. When you add a mortgage, it really drops your net worth :(. Other than that however, it’s pretty dang cool to have as a tool.
Yeah, a mortgage can be rough on the ol’ net worth. I’m glad to hear you’re trying out Yodlee.
After you add in your mortgage, you need to add in the value of your house as a custom asset. That will help to balance it out. If you use Fidelity FullView (which is Yodlee) you can actually add a Zillow.com asset with your address and it will give keep an asset with the value of your home more-or-less accurate. Pretty slick.
The main reason I feel safe having all my accounts in Yodlee is that I can log into Yodlee once per day and check that no fraud has happened across any of ~20 accounts. If I didn’t use Yodlee I would only be checking some of them once a month when the statement arrived, so I could easily have one account cleaned out and not notice it for weeks!
Have you seen our Electric CheckBook entry for RailsRumble07? It was completely designed and built during the 48-hour Rails competition.
Its flexible double-entry ledgers can be shared within a group enabling remote partners, your accountant and spouse to share access to the appropriate accounts without emailing files back and forth.
Mint is obviously a bit more mature, but ours was designed, developed and launched in 48 hours. It has already replaced Quickbooks for our small distributed team and handles our accounting, project budgeting, and contractor timesheets. We’ll continue to add features that we need to manage our personal and business finances.