Yodlee

[alternate title: my second love affair with a web applicattion]

A little while ago, I mentioned that I had been reading some personal finance blogs, and trying to glean some usable and great information from them. An unwritten implication of this is that the best tools and offers end up here, cause I’m excited about them.

Well, today is one such day where you get your bite-sized dose of personal finance fun!

Yodlee!!!!!!!!!!111111

Sometime about two weeks ago, while reading the archives of one of my favorite-to-read-blogs-now, MyMoneyBlog (no, not mine, his, whatever), I stumbled about his post regarding Yodlee.

What is Yodlee?

Yodlee is a free service that offers the ability to manage just about any type of financial account very easily. It is designed for accounts you can view online, as every day or so, it automatically updates the balance of any account you import. Since pictures are leet, here’s a screenshot of my current view, albeit with most of the juicy details massacred by the ever-handy eraser in MSPaint:

That makes me squeal (well, not actually, but basically experience the emotion associated with happy squealing) with delight. All that information lists my current balances with any type of account (you can see the multiple ones I manage there), and keeps them current. This screen is one part of the Yodlee Dashboard, which seems to be the core of the service. You can organize and manage all sorts of modules from this screen, including:

- the Net Worth Module: seen above,
- the Transaction Log: basically tracks every time money enters or leaves your hands, all in one list, for every account,
- the Portfolio Manager: lists all stocks/bonds/mutual funds/whatnot you own, and tracks number of shares, share price, total value,
- Alert Manager: for each account you can setup alerts such as when you are approaching a credit limit, when a bill is due, when a statement is issued (for a credit card for example), or even if there is a single change in the balance (for say, an inactive, unused, 0 balance credit card).
- and several other modules that didn’t really tickle my pickle.

Wow, all this stuff for free? That’s right, but there’s more!!1

In addition, Yodlee pulls together all your expenses and sources of income and makes expense analysis pie charts for you in roughly 25 potential categories. It attempts to auto-designate the category for your line items, but it can’t always figure out all of them so you can manually go in and tell it what a given purchase was. You can also set rules for what each item is (for example, on my 401k I get spammed with like 10 line items per paycheck that say “blah blah blah EMPLOYER MATCH.” Knowing this is always a form of Investment Income, I made a rule saying whenever you see ‘EMPLOYER MATCH’, put it in category “Investment Income.” woot!)

Here’s a graph for the expenses of the dear Heather and, June 2006.

Not gonna tell you what Categories match up to what colors because you’d be like, “dood, how do you spend so much on item ___?!” Rest assured it tracks the categories by percentage of total spending and total amount spent right next to this chart inside Yodlee.

Beyond this, Yodlee has other features I’m still learning about, including the ability to set Budget Goals for your expenses, and a graphical calendar interface that allows you to see when things come due, etc.

How many eggs you gonna fit in that thur’ basket?

The primary problem with Yodlee is the whole “all your eggs in one basket” problem. Given that Yodlee has to access your accounts online all the time, it obviously needs the login credentials for every single site you import. Given that most of these type of sites ALWAYS say you should NEVER give your password to anyone, this is somewhat jarring. As you can see in the first image above, there are auto-login links for every one of these sites, and with one click I have all the power I need to move money in or out etc, etc.

Basically, not sure what to tell you if this is a major concern (not that it wasn’t a concern of me, but you know how it goes). All I can say, as Jonathan of MyMoneyBlog points out in his post about it, that at least if something went wrong, you’d know instantly because Yodlee would update with the large discrepancy that is common with a haxxoring :p. Other than that, this hang-up is about the only weakness in Yodlee, and a large one at that.

In conclusion, the usage of Yodlee has kept me alot more attentive about my finances in a super-magnified way. It also means I don’t have to login to 69342 different websites to get a snapshot of where I am financially, nor do I have to do a whole bunch of legwork importing data into a offline money management software, like Microsoft Money.

Yodlee Login/Registration link

FL: The Ten Most Violent Children’s Games – hahah.