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I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people f
by WesleyJohnson 16y ago
I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it for a few hours before canceling on both occasions. To me, true finance management is not only analyzing existing spending, but preparing for future spending.
I want to be able to setup a budget.
I want to be able to setup recurring transactions and future bill payments so when I look at my finances at any given moment, I can see what I have coming due today, tomorrow, in two weeks.
I don't want to rely on my bank to tell me how much cash I have available, because it doesn't know the $1 pending gas charge from yesterday is actually a $45 fill up that hasn't cleared, but I do.
I want to keep track of all aspects of my paycheck so I can estimate my taxes all year long and adjust my withholdings accordingly or save if I'm going to have to pay in.
I'm sure I could go on and on. I realize we're moving towards (or are already in) the era of webapps and people are moving away from desktop apps, but I've yet to find a decent online finance manager that does what MS Money can do. It's a shame they discontinued it, because in my opinion it kicks the crap out of Mint.
I'm not really sure how this relates to the article, I just think it's a shame that Wasabe lost out to Mint because Mint was dumbed down enough that users don't have to do much of anything. Properly manging your finances should most certainly require user interaction to do it properly and it sounds like Wasabe was trying to do just that. Maybe that's why so many people struggle with finances, because they don't take an active enough roll in managing them and I fear something like Mint just aids in that passiveness.
As the Marc says in the article, "Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance." It's been a while since I've given it a look, but last I check Mint wasn't even close. If Wasabe was, it's truly a shame they were beat out by Mint catering to and lazy users and enabling them to stay lazy when IMHO, the problem they're allegedly trying to solve requires exactly the opposite.
- natrius 16y agoMint has budgets. In fact, I'd say it's their killer feature. They also added pending transactions recently, though I don't really use them.
- zaphoyd 16y agoI completely agree here. Mint is too simple and automates too much that shouldn't be automated. I have been toying around a web based finance project of my own and if you'd be interested I'd love to talk more about what exactly you might find useful.
- frossie 16y agoI want banksimple.com, or some other kind of 21st century bank that will let me do all this stuff natively from my primary banking....
- bfish 16y agoIf you qualify for membership, USAA has added a lot of Mint-like features to their online banking service.