Archive for the ‘Websites for Debtbeats’ Category

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.

Are you desperately keeping up the Joneses? That’s probably the reason why you’re reading a debt blog. But if you can’t fight the urge to spend like the folks down the block, there’s a new tool available to help you do it down to the last penny.

Bundle.com is a new service from Microsoft, Citibank and the rating agency Morningstar that lets you see what people in your area are spending their money on and compare it to your own.

It’s a cross between a personal finance website and social networking tool whose intent is to change the way that people talk about their money. Riding on the heels of established services like Mint.com and new sites like Bippy, Bundle’s first shot across the bow is a tool called Everybody’s Money, the first of several products they plan to launch in the coming year.  It allows Bundlers (Bundle-ites? Bundlebees?)  to see how their neighbors spend money on things like dining out, gas, entertainment and groceries.

Here is a snapshot of Bundle’s data from Washington, D.C. (Which is, not coincidentally, home to the Debtbeat HQ.)

Noticeably absent is the category for ”booze.”

In addition to the location search, data can be refined by age range, income level, family composition. There is a pretty nifty drilldown component to the dashboard, but it was fairly slow to load on my computer. You can even see which stores, restaurants and businesses people are spending their money at.

Bundle gets its data from federal government, spending transactions from Citi (although these are anonymous and aggregated) and from third party data providers. Their spending data is only updated once a quarter, which isn’t as great as we’d like to see given how drastically the ups and downs in the stock market and our overall economy are happening nowadays. But it is enough to capture seasonality in the information.

Users can comment on the different spending categories using their Facebook login, a common feature on sites today. There’s also integration with Twitter for users to share their findings.

What’s lost on me is how this can actually be a useful financial tool.  Interesting, yes. Useful? Only if you can explain to me how knowing that my peers spend more on food but less on travel will impact my future decisions.

We’ll keep this one on our radar, but check out Bundle for yourself and let us know what you think.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Debtbeat rule number two is Spend Less, but that’s easier said than done when we have been programmed to make cash registers go ka-ching whenever we see something new, shiny, cool or hot.

Without a little help from our friends we’re as good as toast. That’s where the pig comes in.

FeedthePig.org (as in piggy bank) is the online home of a personal finance campaign sponsored by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Ad Council. Their mission is to help young Americans understand the value of saving and their advice is applicable to young Americans of all ages.

You may have seen their “spokespig” Benjamin Bankes in one of several TV commercials like these.

The site offers savings tips cross a wide spectrum of everyday spending, including surprising topics like makeup and happy hours.

Some of the other features include:

• Choosing a personality similar to yours in the Me Save? tool then selecting spending habits you want to change.
• Syncing your Feed the Pig profile with Facebook or iGoogle to track what you can save over time.
• Finding out how much you can save no matter what course your life takes in the 5% Challenge.
• Learning more about the psychology behind money habits.
• Forums for talking to others about how they save.”
• Seeing more TV and radio spots.
• Links to their companion site, 360financialliteracy.org, which has advice for people at all stages of life.

You can follow the pig on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

So bookmark Feed the Pig and check in often to jump start your savings and learn more ways to keep more cash in your pocket that can be used to get out of debt.