Financial Tracking Software (Mint or Yodlee)

I've been using financial software since I was married in the early 90's. At that time, financial software helped you keep track of your checking and savings accounts, however you needed to enter the information and keep it up to date. They also helped you create a budget

How things have changed since then, now financial tracking software updates each transaction for you, tracks your 401k, roth ira, 529 account, home loan, car loan, and can even keep track of how much your house is worth. It still does the budget thing, and tracks when your bills are due.

I have landed on two free on-line tools that help you keep track of all of this. Of course, there's always the Quicken or Microsoft Money software you can buy. But, why not something you can log into from anywhere?

Mint.com is a free on-line financial service that provides the user with a way to see everything financially about the user. You will have to sign up with all the institutions you would like to track before using Mint.com.

Cash - Track your bank account balances including checking transaction, savings accounts, and cd's.

Credit Cards - Track all of your credit cards in one place and see your transactions for each credit card.

Loans - Same with loans, track them all in one spot.

Investments - Mint has come a long way and has started to track your investments, how is each doing, and what does all of your investments together look like?

Money Saving Options - One of the two best features of Mint, provides the users with money saving options based on the accounts you already have. Do you have a checking account with a 1/2% yield, Mint will find others offering more. Credit cards with better rates, or better cash back offers as well.

The Blog - The other great feature, I have the Mint blog on this site, it is one of the information sources I go to about money and advice. Plus it lets me know about new features. Below are the current Blog entries from Mint.com.

Net worth - It does an ok job on Net Worth, the fact that you can't add in home values or car values skews the Net worth calculation if you have those loans tracking in the site.

Overall, I would give Mint.com a 4 out of 5 stars. Once it adds asset values and cleans up its display, I would move it to 5 stars.

My other financial management website on steroids is Yodlee.com. Yodlee offers the same type of information as Mint: Investments, Savings, Checking, Loans, Credit Cards. Yodlee also provides tracking of affinity programs for airlines and hotels.

In addition, to these pieces I find the following better than Mint.

The Interface - The Yodlee interface is very appealing and flexible. It provides a snapshot of all our you accounts on one screen. It also allows you to customize the screen to put the different modules on different places on the screen.

Home Value - A special module tracks the value of your house and uses it as part of your net worth, thus not skewing the new worth calculation.

Manual Entry - You can manually enter other loans or assets thus giving you a complete picture of your net worth.

I give Yodell 4 out of 5 stars as well based on the tools above. For Yodlee to gain 5 stars, they would need to provide alternative products to help me lower my interest rates, phone service, or home equity loan as Mint does today.