Comparison of Online Budgeting Services
I've been using Mint and Pocketsmith. You give them access to read your bank account transactions, and they provide the friendly front end user interface that banks lack, including charts of your spending trends. Each service has strengths and weaknesses.
Mint.com is mostly good at tracking and categorizing your expenses. I love its handy mobile app to manually record and categorize cash transactions as they happen. It give you a cash balance "account" based on your ATM withdrawals, and deducts the manual records from that. Pocketsmith has a mobile version of their website, with offline support that synchronizes your activities when your device goes online. However, since my phone broke, I haven't used the mobile Pocketsmith yet. I'll find out more next week.
If all you want is to receive an alert when you're about to exceed your spending limit in a certain type of expense, Mint.com would suffice. But it's not a planning tool. It lets you increase your budget on any line item to any amount you wish, without alerting you if you're going to spend more than you earn. For years, I've used spreadsheets to forecast my cash by comparing my projected income to my estimated expenses. Spreadsheets! What a pain. Mint.com has ignored requests for a forecast feature for the last several years. Mint's business model is to gather information about your spending habits, so they can try to persuade you to use their company's advertised clients-- not in ads, but embedded in the context of "advice" about your specific financial circumstances. Mint is free because the service itself is an ad to persuade you to switch credit cards, car insurance, or investments.
If you want to analyze patterns in your cashflow to get a forecast of your future balance, you'll have to pay for it. This is the purpose of Pocketsmith, which costs $10 a month, or $24.95 for three months. It is based around calendars. You can schedule projected expenses and incomes into the future, which will be over-ridden by your actual transactions as each new day arrives. Your upcoming twelve months are shown as a line graph, so you can adjust your spending plan until the line points upward.
The free Pocketsmith plan is really just a demo, since it will automatically categorize everything into far more categories than the twelve that you are allowed for free. Then it will only allow you to work with twelve categories it chose arbitrarily. It will treat the rest of your transactions as if they do not exist, leading to a useless analysis and forecast.
In either system, your expenses will be imported from your bank and automatically categorized-- badly. In Mint, correcting category mistakes is convenient, but in Pocketsmith, it's done piecemeal in several confusing interfaces. I spent painful hours categorizing transactions through the "Categories", "Personal Summary", and "Cashflows" views, each of which conceals part of the information you need to figure out which categories are messed up. Then I discovered that the best views to use for this process are called "Merchants" and "Bank Statements" for some reason.
Also, I am only using my main bank with Pocketsmith, because the one that I use for supplemental purposes was nowhere to be found in their account setup section. I'm not sure if this is their fault, or that of the bank.
Once your transactions are correctly categorized, though, Pocketsmith gives you the information and calculations that you need in order to decide what areas you need to cut back on, and when you can afford something you are saving for. Soon I expect to transition out of Mint entirely.
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