I started this post awhile ago. But with my brothers angry credit card company post and my angry student loan post, I think a post about how to easily manage ones finances is more topical than ever. So anyway… My official  attempt to better manage my finances all started about 6 months ago when Hiromi and I first got married. With her away for most of that time – I was able to get things in a more working order than they were before. So then when she arrived she wouldn’t have to deal with the spidery cobwebbed world that was my banking. So I kinda got things in a reasonable state and I decided to start using quicken again. But like everytime I use quicken – it wasn’t interesting enough to keep up with. So I started looking for alternatives.

I found Wesabe.

I first read about Wesabe on some blog about startups. It mentioned that it was a way to use a community to get hints and help in managing your finances. Well, using a community to view my money seemed a bit weird. But like any weirdo web 2.0 nerd I decided to jump in and check it out. So I signed up. I uploaded some account data (after reading their security statement – nice). I was immediately in the world of viewing my finances in an interesting way. Fun.

Wesabe basically takes your financial data and make it easy to see what’s going down in your world. It then uses tags, names and other aggregate data to find hints and tips from the community that may help you. It is also able to provide graphs and interesting views of your finances. You can tag and note transactions. You can give things real names and really get a feeling for where your money is going.  All this makes Wesabe a sort of flickr for money. It is awesome.

So I then attempted successfully to use the uploader and was able to upload all of my accounts to Wesabe and BAM. suddenly the power of it clicked. I am able to see trends. I can set goals and then assign certain tags to that goal to see what kind of spending I am doing and visualize what my personal financial trends are. In a way that isn’t hard to understand. its pretty neat. And the tips from the other users are fun.

So if you are like me and quicken isn’t your thing, but you want a neat way to check out your finances. I would certainly look into using Wesabe. It owns.