Considering the fact that most households now juggle many accounts across a wide range of financial institutions, keeping track of all those bank accounts, investments, credit cards and loans has become a real challenge. To meet the need, sites like Mint.com (one of my favorites) sprung up to help put a bow around all this information.

We’re now seeing the next iteration of these financial tools, with a new service called HelloWallet, founded by a former Brookings Institution consumer finance scholar.

Like Mint, HelloWallet performs the traditional budgeting and money tracking functions of sites like Mint, but goes one step further in actually recommending customized financial plans for everything from saving for college to saving for retirement.

The catch? HelloWallet charges a monthly subscription fee of $4, unlike the free personal finance sites.

HelloWallet offers to help you in several key areas including:

• Finding better banking products
• Creating a personal financial plan
• Growing your savings
• Reducing debt

The site claims to track and rate over 50,000 different financial products for better prices, without being beholden to the banking industry. That’s because they don’t accept advertising, although it will be interesting to see if they can survive on subscription revenue alone.

According to Matt Fellowes, HelloWallet’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, “Mint.com is fundamentally a money management service. We are more of a money guidance service.” They’ll need to really deliver on that promise in order to gain any real market share.

HelloWallet has some heavy-hitter endorsements, including the mayor of Los Angeles and former President Bill Clinton. But that’s understandable given their connections and the fact that it’s hard to speak ill of any service that aims to help putting American back on their financial feet.

To boost their PR in that respect, HelloWallet is providing the service free to at least 300,000 low-income families over the next five years, and the Rockefeller Foundation is providing funds to nonprofits to provide 10,000 subscriptions to HelloWallet for low-income Americans.

We’ll keep our eye on this site to see if it becomes a household name and if it provides real value over and above what’s out there already and for free.

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