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After reading about the money management site Rudder in an article on Lifehacker, I thought I would check it out and see if I liked it more than Mint. I’ve been using Mint to track all of my finances for quite some time now. I tried Quicken Online when it became free but, at the time, it didn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. I recently logged in and they have added the places where I have accounts which had been missing when I first joined. Like Quicken Online, Rudder doesn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. It, however, is only missing one, whereas Quicken Online was missing two. Rudder also can’t track loans. It can only keep track of checking, savings, and credit card accounts right now. When I gave it the info for my American Express login, it only returned two of my three Amex cards. An unreleased feature, which I would like to see on Mint, is Goals. They don’t give much information about it but, if I had to guess, I would say you would provide how much money you want to save towards a goal (first home, car, emergency fund, etc.) and when you would like to reach that goal, and it would tell you how much money you have to save each month to reach that goal. Nowadays, with automatic scheduled transfers, anyone can do that if their bank offers it.

Technorati Tags: Mint, Mint.com, Quicken, Rudder

I’ve recently decided to take control of all my finances. I began my downloading and installing GnuCash. GnuCash is a free alternative to Quicken and Microsoft Money that runs on Windows and Linux, so if I ever decide to dump Windows completely, I’ll have a program I’m familiar with that I can use in Linux. The next thing I did was sign up for my company 401(k). I elected to have 10% of my pay go towards my 401(k) even though my company only matches 25% of the first 6%. Then I opened up a savings account at my local branch. The last couple of days I’ve been reading some personal finance blogs and decided to open up an Orange Savings account with ING Direct. I’m going to use my bank’s savings account as an emergency fund and the ING account to make money. To keep track of everything, I created an account on Mint.com. Mint.com can log into all my web accounts (banking, credit cards, and investments) and summarize everything for me. Finally, to track my net worth, I created an account at NetworthIQ. I have to manually enter in my income, expenses, and liabilities for it to tell me what my net worth is.

Technorati Tags: ING Direct, Mint.com, NetworthIQ, personal finances