Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Google, Social Software, Weekend Review
Expensr - find out where all your money goes
If you're just starting out and want to get a leg up on your finances, Expensr, a web based personal finance app might be for you. It is free and allows you to create budgets to track your spending and projected spending. You can upload your bank account statements in a .ofx format, or manually enter transactions as you would in your checkbook register.
A nice security feature is the fact that you upload your bank statements manually. You don't have to provide your bank username and pasword (as with some other finance products). OFX files do contain your bank account number, but not your bank username and password. Expensr does not store the OFX file after parsing it, only the transactions in it (name, date, amount).Since Expensr is a social network, you can compare your spending against others. This means you get to see the aggregated data of the users of a particular tag. See screenshot below. The green represents the aggregated data from the tag 'woman', and the blue is data from your user account.
StatMatch is a feature where you can really go local by comparing your spending with that of your friends. If a user looking at your profile is in your friend list, and if you have StatMatch enabled (it's disabled by default), then they can match up their core stats to yours in a nice table that shows up on your profile. With this information, you can check out who got the killer deal in rent or who spends more on entertainment. Why is this important? We're not sure, but at least you can attempt to keep up with the Jones's.
This is a beta site and they are constantly adding improvements based on user feedback. Some additional features that would be helpful are:
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Help wiki - it would be great to be able to find answers to common questions in a help forum.
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Automated categories - it's a bit tiring to manually input categories, (ex. Publix, groceries) for transactions that appear frequently.
Bottom line: Expensr a good place to get started on your personal finance journey. It's easy and has some fun features to help you manage what some people find horribly routine. However, when you start filing something other than the IRS EZ forms, you will probably want to graduate to Quicken or Quickbooks to really help you categorize, sub-categorize, evade, etc.
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They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
