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.