Archive | personal finance RSS feed for this section

Taxes, what a mess

by evbart on February 23, 2008 in personal finance, webapps

This review really sums up my experience last year. The tax software I used was confusing, poorly explained, un-documented, and you always felt like they were trying to scam you out of a couple bucks.A very big change from the experience that many of today’s software startups (yes (sigh), many of them are “web2.0″ startups) are trying to provide (free, comforting, easy, super intuative). Guess there’s an opportunity here, and eventually people will get sick of being treated poorly by the larger companies.

I’m seeing an average price of 40-60$ on the packages that include a state filing, and I’ve heard from some of my friends that they paid $75 to have someone in Brooklyn do it for them. Doesn’t seem like a great deal?

For what its worth, Top 10 reviews covers what they think are the best apps here and a whole section devoted to it here. I used Taxcut last year because I thought it was the easiest to use of the 2 or 3 that I tried (can’t remember what the others where). In the end, though, I still clicked the “submit” button with my fingers crossed just hoping I did everything right.

Other Reviews of Tax Software:

http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/tax-preparation-software/

Top 3 from About.com

http://financialplan.about.com/od/software/tp/TPTaxSoftware.htm

Cnet.com (not very complete, but has news sources, etc)

http://www.cnet.com/tax-guide/

Turbo Tax Review

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/582003/turbo_tax_online_online_tax_software.html

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

View Comments

Mint vs Wesabe: Personal Budgeting Showdown

by evbart on February 8, 2008 in personal finance, Uncategorized

Mint vs. Wesabe

So, I’ve talked about this subject for a while and I’ve made a lot of suggestions, but no one seems to be getting it right.

Wesabe is too free form and doesn’t provide enough reporting or structure, while Mint is the exact opposite. It provides too much structure, though the analytics and reporting tools seem like they would be great, if they could handle a more flexible set of categories.

Here are the categories for Mint:

mint categories

Why are books under shopping, and why isn’t there a place for me to keep track of my business expenses?

Point being, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. You don’t have to choose between having a completely unstructured list of user defined tags or a fixed list of categories. Do the work for your users. Come up with a flexible list of categories that you initially suggest, but the user can move away from as soon as they get the hang of things. Build reporting tools smart enough to support this, so that you can continue to tell that user useful things about their spending habits, even as their categories change.

Mint is definitely closer to what I want, but Wesabe’s tagging is more flexible. Maybe the next stop will be with the big boys, Quicken?

Update: Here’s another review of Mint, and another from Webware here. I’m really getting sold on Mint. It definitely is the best choice if you don’t have to track things like businesses expenses, and you need to get off to a nice, easy, informative start on personal budgeting.

The Quicken vs. Mint review has already been started here, though it probably needs to be updated.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

View Comments

Wesabe Suggestions

by evbart on June 14, 2007 in personal finance, personal productivity, review

See my full review of Wesabe here.

My first suggestion for Wesabe is to create “training wheels”, a suggested series of tags, structured according to some higher level organization. Many users aren’t going to think far enough ahead to plan this out themselves the first time they use the service. Wesabe can prevent them from working themselves into a jam, and increase the chances they will have a positive experience with this type of guidance.

The personal finance categories I include are of the Microsoft Personal Budget Template , and could be a good starting place. Eventually it may be good to let the users themselves share their “personal finance categories” or “tag framework” so that other users can copy it if they like it.
Continue Reading →

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

View Comments

Wesabe: social personal finance

by evbart on June 14, 2007 in personal finance, personal productivity, review, web application

I’ve been using Wesabe for over six months now, and just finally had time to sit down and write about it. Its been picking up some traction on some top blogs like A VC and Gotham Girl, and I wanted to join in on the fun because i don’t think the analysis is in depth enough.

Part of the reason that it took me so long is because I was really compelled to give it a fair trial. The idea to be able to better manage your expenses, is a very interesting one that has a rather large potential market. Just about everyone I know has a bank account, and most of them are pretty unimpressed by the online services offered as well as by the idea of using Quicken or Excel.

Wesabe a very innovative solution for getting your financial data into a nice clean format that is ripe for analysis. On a higher level, they are using the wisdom of crowds to try teach us personal finance best practices. This isn’t a topic that most people are willing to share and talk about openly, so the social benefits of this application down the road are enormous. I absolutely encourage you to take a look at this service, and most of my analysis below is positive. My only criticisms are because they have done is such a great job so far, that it begs to be taken to the next level.
Continue Reading →

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

View Comments