Wall Street Journal’s Best Free Online Tools for Personal Finance
by cecile
Mint.com automatically aggregates all your online financial data and then keeps track of credit cards, home loans and bank and brokerage accounts all in one place. It also keeps track of how your investments are performing, and what you are spending and saving. It helps you to budget better by automatically displaying how much you spend in any given category.
One concern we all have is online safety. Mint uses 128-bit SSL encryption, the financial industry standard, to protect all communications with your browser. This prevents potential hackers from "tapping" a data conversation. Mint provides a strictly “read only” view of your transaction information. Your online banking user names and passwords are never displayed after you enter them during your first session. Mint describes their security provisions here.
Geezo.com and Wesabe.com both offer a social networking element to share tips and advice. Caveat—they need usernames and passwords for your various accounts—and they show advertisements based on your activity.
Creating a Financial Plan
Simplifi.net uses a virtual financial advisor named Sophie to guide you through a planning process based on goals such as saving and reducing debt, you don’t have to give financial info—just plug in numbers. This site is registered with the SEC and we know what a great job they’ve done lately—nonetheless, the site complies with the rules for registered investment advisors.
Planwithvoyant.com charts and graphs your current financial condition and allows you to test “what if” scenarios like unexpected pregnancy or early retirement.
Basic.esplanner.com calculates your sustainable living standard and allows you to tinker which changes and best of all it incorporates nitty-gritty details other sites leave out like federal and state taxes and future SS benefits.
Tracking Portfolios and Getting Advice
Socialpicks.com allows you to keep track of your own investments and compare your portfolio’s performance to that of peers, professional analysts and financial bloggers.
Cakefinancial.com lets you aggregate all portfolios in one place, analyze past performance up to 10 years and compare portfolios with others. Also looks at your current investments and finds similar replacement funds wither lower fees and expenses.
Portfoliomonkey.com has analytic and simulation tools previously only available to professionals. Enter your portfolio’s ticker symbols and # of shares the site analyzes your current allocation’s expected returns and losses based on analytics evaluating historical volatility and performance—can also help you reallocate your portfolio and offer stock picks that have a low correlation with your portfolio and high expected returns—you can go through them and see how they would affect your portfolio’s performance.
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