In this recessionary economy, keeping track of your money can be like a stomach-churning roller-coaster ride.
If you haven't already done it, now is the time to get your finances under control. The World Wide Web seems to crank out a new budgeting site every time there's a dip in the Dow industrials. So to help settle your stomach and your accounts, we've picked the best Web sites to help you set a steady course for spending and saving.
For a fresh view of your big financial picture, Mint.com is our favorite. The online money management tool lets you easily track all your accounts: checking, savings, credit cards, loans and investments. Signing up is fast and free; to get started, you need only provide an e-mail address and ZIP code, then select a password.
Next, link up your accounts. The site connects to more than 7,500 U.S. financial institutions and is adding more. You have to provide user names and passwords for all your bank accounts, but don't worry: The site maintains a secure connection. All user names and passwords are encrypted so that no one at Mint ever sees them. And you don't provide the site with any personal information besides your e-mail and ZIP code.
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Mint updates all your accounts at least once a day and automatically labels each expense with a category -- groceries, credit card payments, gas and so on. You can use customized tags to create more-specific categories, and you can add notes to each transaction. The site also offers personalized savings tips, such as suggesting better credit cards for cash rebates and travel rewards.
Mint's sleek screens make even the ugliest of finances just a little bit prettier. Under the "Trends" tab, the "Where You Spend" pie charts break down your expenses into a rainbow of categories. Click on a slice and you'll see a new, more-detailed pie chart with its own slices. For example, the food-and-dining category splits into groceries, restaurants, fast food, coffee shops and the like. And the site's "SpendSpace" bar graphs let you compare your spending habits with average outlays of people in select cities or states, or the whole country.
Unfortunately, you can't manually add transactions to your Mint account, so you can't project future costs or tally any extra cash or expenditures. To remedy the latter issue, the site suggests you split ATM withdrawals into separate cash transactions. Mint's support forums are another weak aspect of the site.
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If you're more interested in an online community, we suggest Geezeo or Wesabe, which are also free. Wesabe keeps your budgeting focused. Although you can manage credit and savings accounts on the site, we had trouble uploading that data and stuck primarily to tracking our checking. However, Wesabe lets you manually enter cash accounts and transactions.
You can link all your accounts to Geezeo, but we experienced some difficulty when trying to add more than one account from a single financial institution. Also, its investment-account tracker is rather bare-bones, listing only your holdings' shares and market values -- unlike Mint, whose investment tool tracks fund and stock performance and portfolio allocation. Like Mint, Geezeo automatically tags your expenses; Wesabe invites you to create your own labels.
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