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Social Networking and Personal Finance Mixed Together
By JLP | June 14, 2007
Today’s WSJ had part two($) of their Young Money series. The WSJ has not made this series freely available to the public, which is unfortunate since most “young moneyers” aren’t subscribers. Anyhow, today’s article was about websites that allow people to manage their money in full public view, much like a lot of personal finance bloggers have been doing for years.
The article didn’t focus on bloggers, but rather on websites that operate sort of like forums. Users can upload their personal financial information and other users can offer up suggestions on how to do better. It’s a pretty cool idea but not one I will ever do since everyone knows me. I’m also a little leery of giving these sites access to my personal finance information as well as links and passwords to financial websites. From the article:
The type of information you need to enter into these sites — and how public that information becomes — depends on the site and what you want to get out of it. At Geezeo, for example, users provide their passwords for their bank and credit-card accounts, which the site uses to automatically pull users’ data into its systems. At Wesabe, users download a software program onto their computer and then enter their passwords. The program then pulls their data from the banks to users’ computers, and then uploads it to Wesabe’s computers.
At both sites, users’ data is kept private, although members can voluntarily share more information about themselves with other people. The sites will also aggregate user information to reveal spending patterns in the community — such as the average amount users spend on gas — but will not disclose individual data.
If you’re still interested, I have listed the sites below. I am only familiar with NetworthIQ. The rest of them I have never heard of. Here’s the sites listed in the article:
Organizing Your Finances
Tracking Expenses
Helping You Invest
Have any of you had any experience with any of these sites? If so, leave a comment and let the rest of us know what you think.
Topics: Blogging |
