I ::heart:: Yodlee
I love Yodlee. What is it? It is a company that provides “financial application solutions”. In human-speak, it lets you keep track of all your financial accounts.
Several months ago, I got MS Money 2006. It’s a piece of trash. Don’t get it. It’s bulky and a pain in the ass. It can’t seem to ever connect to any of my accounts and keeps insisting logging me into my MSN profile even though I don’t want to. It didn’t know what to do with the fact that I was putting all my expenses on the credit card to pay them off at the end of the month (or throughout the month). For instance, if I spent $300 on food and $200 on entertainment on the credit card then immediately paid it off with my bank checking account, it would show up on my monthly spending pie chart with $300 for food, $200 for entertainment, and $500 for credit card payment. That in essence makes it look like I’ve doubled my spendings. There is a similar problem with simple transfers between checking and savings accounts, where the withdrawal and deposit doesn’t automatically reconcile as one transfer.
I’m sure there is a way to make it work. And I’m not an idiot or a technophobe. I’m a software engineer! I’m tech-savvy. I love to find interesting solutions. But frankly, my experience with MS Money sucked. Giant donkey balls, to be crass.
I’ve been a big fan of “My Portfolio” that Bank of America provides. Through it, I can add all my financial accounts (bank accounts, mortgage loans, school loans, 401(k) plan, whatever you can think of) and even most of my frequent flyer mile plans.
I learned a few weeks? months? ago that Yodlee’s technology is what powers BofA’s portfolio. However, when I went over to their site, I couldn’t figure out how to use their service directly, instead of going through their client corporations like Fidelity, BofA, Wachovia, etc. But a few days ago, I saw this link to their registration page.
Schweet!
Going through their site directly means that I have access to the full network of accounts that they provide. The clients only have a subset of the network selectively turned on.
This means that I can track everything, even my Comcast bill, my PG&E bill, whatever, along with all my financial accounts. I can track all my frequent flyer mile and rewards programs, even the hotel ones (that’s for you, Uyen). There is a little calendar that tracks when all my payments happened and when I have bills coming up (it accepts eBills, either directly or through the bank account that I can add). It makes great charts for me, and the automatic reconciliation of transfers between accounts and not double-counting credit card pay-offs is AWESOME.
All I have to do is add Seppo’s retirement accounts and maybe two more of the utilities and ALL our cash flow will be tracked. It handles simple budgeting as well. It’s all I’ve wanted and more!
And it’s all free.
Check out the demo video here.
You can thank me later.
“Of course, one must consider whether one wants all their accounts in one place, especially online.”
Exactly. I’m nervous enough just accessing my individual accounts online. Steph has gotten to be pretty good with Quicken at work, so that’s what we (she) use at home.
Wow, that’s fantastic! Thanks!
Does this mean you have budgeted your way to buying a new mobile phone?
Does this mean you have budgeted your way to buying a new mobile phone?
You know, I just might answer that in another post. 😀
I am thinking about posting about where I am financially, in the big picture. It used to be that I was always very stressed out about money. But now, I am not. There are lot of reasons why not, the biggest of them being that I made good money now. The second biggest reason is that I also manage that money well and have developed better habits in general. The third biggest reason is that I’ve done projections of various life events (medical emergency, family planning, death, etc.) and we are fairly well-prepared for most of them. Not all, and not to 100%, but fairly well planned for them.
A part of that is being able to see the bottom line any time I want. Everyday, I log in to my bank accounts and my yodlee account, and I know where I am financially. It’s a good feeling.
Also, because I log on everyday anyway, I would know in less than 24 hours if any bogus charges had been put on any of my accounts or any illicit transfers have been requested.
1. I don’t need a new mobile phone.
2. I’m trying to budget my way to a house, thankyouverymuch.
Chilling: BofA just added this neat “My Portfolio Overview” tool to their website, allowing me to tie in all my accounts (American Express, rewards, et cetera). Must be Yodlee… I had this bookmarked and was going to check it out… looks like I can do it from BofA.
dre: Note what I wrot ein the original post: “I’ve been a big fan of “My Portfolio” that Bank of America provides. Through it, I can add all my financial accounts (bank accounts, mortgage loans, school loans, 401(k) plan, whatever you can think of) and even most of my frequent flyer mile plans.” 😀
It is indeed powered by Yodlee. They don’t provide access to my Asiana frequent flyer miles, although they do for almost everything else.
Strangely, MS Money is also powered by Yodlee, but the way they handle the data and connections sucks, which is why it won’t update half my stuff most of the time.
According to Ei-Nyung’s post, though, the BofA version is only a subset of the full Yodlee.
Yeah, I forgot how to read; I thought you were referencing something else on BofA’s site.
Of course, one must consider whether one wants all their accounts in one place, especially online.
That is something for your to weigh on your own.
One way to go with this is to add all your billing accounts there (like utilities, cable, phone, etc.) so that you can take advantage of the billpay capabilities and the monthly scheduling and not your asset accounts.