Financial Management: followup

A while back, I told you I was testing several different financial managament solutions.  I’m done testing and wanted to let you know what I’ve found.  The winner for me is NeoBudget.   It offered all of what I need & most of what I’d like with a very reasonable price.  Here’s what I found:

INZOLO - This newcomer looks like it has promise, but is just not functional yet, and at a price of $4.95 a month, you gotta give me more than that!

Pros:

  • Very nice interface, I like the icons you can assign to your categories
  • Very similar style to Mvelopes, if you are switching over there’s very little learning curve
  • Ability to automatically import bank info
  • Can view envelope balances via m.inzolo.com on my iPhone

Cons:

  • I found no way to match manual entries with imported ones.  For example: I spend $3.00 at the car wash and log it in via Safari on my iPhone.  Later, when I import my bank transactions, there is no way to match this $3.00 with the $3.00 listed with my bank resulting in a double charge. 
  • I emailed support and posted on thier “need help?” forum with no response to either.   I checked today and my post had 243 views and no answers.  Must not be just me. :)
  • I could never get my bank to link with my Inzolo account.
  • No easy way to enter things manually via my iPhone when I’m out and about (and spending money).  Yes, I can navigate to the site on my tiny screen, but it’s many clicks, hard to find & hard to enter on my phone.
  • No dedicated iPhone app

MVELOPES - this is a totally awesome service.  Really.  If you need something that’s really full featured, this is probably the way to go.

Pros:

  • Link to all your accounts: checking, savings, credit cards, cash, etc and have all the information for your spending and saving at your fingertips automatically.
  • Highly customizable - if you want to put in the time to set it up, you can get it to configure things pretty much any way you want.
  • Great interface.  Being able to visualize having money in actual envelopes really helped me.
  • iPhone app.  Not just a mobile interface.  An actual fully functional app.  Rock n Roll. I was wrong.  I was using the mobile interface…but it’s a very good mobile interface…. Sorry!

Cons:

  • Customer service is attrocious and intrusive.  I believe I blogged about my experience earlier.  *shudder*
  • Price.  Kinda rediculously expensive given the alternatives.  Since I’ve canceled my account, I can’t find pricing info (another customer service fail) but I believe it was $35 ish, billed quarterly.  That’s 3 pairs of jeans for one of my kids.
  • Learning curve.  This is an incredibly complicated system.  That’s a pro and a con, but for me it was killer.  I have a friend who uses this system and she’s got it nailed down to a science and barely moniters things now, but after 3 months of nothing but frustration trying to get all the automated features to work right … I finally gave up.

NEOBUDGET - this is the service that wins my subsription and loyalty.  I’d encourage you to try it out!

Pros:

  • Simple to set up
  • Clean, easy interface
  • Excellent customer service
  • Affordable ($2.50/mo)
  • Easy to manually add things while on the go via a very good mobile interface
  • Easy to balance my bank account (which is remarkable for me. :)
  • Easy to see my envelope balances on the go
  • Easy to transfer money from one envelope to another

Cons:

  • No dedicated iPhone app yet, and a few things that I can’t do via mobile interface yet - I’d love to be able to transfer from my phone and select which categories I see on my phone. :)
  • No automatic importing of my bank info.  I have to log in at my bank, export to a file, then import to NeoBudget.
  • No automatic assigning of things.  Example:  The entry from Progressive is always my car insurance.  Would be nice to only have to assign that to my Auto envelope once rather than every month.
  • No way to track cash yet
  • No way to combine accounts.  Currently, envelopes are exclusive to each account making it difficult to get an overall picture.  Not a deal breaker to me because I only use one account, but if you have multiple banks or credit cards, this would be less than optimal.

In conclusion: NeoBudget is a delight to work with.  The others were frustrating.  The developer is active, constantly releasing updates that make it better and more fuctional and very responsive to questions.  My finances aren’t that complicated - I have a checking account and a savings account and no credit cards so something like Mvelopes is far more in price and effort than what I need.   The intangibles that are hard to bullet point can be boiled down to this:

I dreaded logging onto the other sites to manage things because of complexity and problems, but NeoBudget almost makes budgeting and money management fun.  Yes, you heard that.   I really feel like I’m controlling my money now rather than it controlling me.  Sometimes I log on just to smile at the pretty colors and all the neat little envelopes with thier positive balances.   And although my Inzolo account and my Mvelope account have the same positive balances (after alot more work), they never gave me the same visceral sense of satisfaction that NeoBudget does.  I’m done testing and ready to live my life with the financial security I’ve reached with a combination of Dave Ramsey’s principles and NeoBudget’s tools.

I’d love to hear if you guys have experience with these.