Boomtrends

Wesabe - Social Financial Management Does Battle with Chickens and Eggs

Which do you consider more personal: What you did last weekend or what your money did last weekend? There are no shortage of places to find out what happened in my social life last weekend. Hit up the social networks and you can see my dirt.

Now there’s a financial planning social network called Wesabe which makes some of your spending habits more public. When I first discovered this site last Friday I was intrigued by the idea. As a somewhat financially responsible young professional, I look for financial advice from equally/more financially responsible close friends, family and some internet peers. The idea of social financial help brought Socialpicks to mind but instead of the investing angle, Wesabe goes after controlling spending habits. Think Web 2.0 meets Quicken.

After a painless sign up process it was time to configure my account. Wesabe offers a client that will pull data from your bank, credit card and savings account. I am a little weary of giving out my passwords to 3rd party websites, so I used Wesabe’s manual upload tool. I was able to download 3 months worth of data from my various accounts into Quicken files and then upload to Wesabe. This seems like a smart move by Wesabe to all new users to experiment with the service without requiring access to their financial account (Wesabe has the standard privacy statement saying you can trust them, they will never share it, yada yada yada).

Once uploaded, I was able to go through each of my statements line by line and tag items. Once an item is tagged as a certain type (Say Gordo’s burrito tagged as food), all other instances will be auto-tagged as that too. Pretty handy. Over time as the Wesabe community cleans up the imported credit card data, items will have more meaningful names. (”Pir sho Val” becomes “Pirate Shop on Valencia Street“). So far, so good.

Based on your tagging, Wesabe reports back how much you’ve been spending and how much you’ve been making. This is where I discovered some issues. For instance, I made a transfer from my check account to my savings account and tagged it as “Savings”. The way Wesabe counts it, that is spending. I would think the service would have some logic to figure that money going from a checking account to a savings account is not “spending”. There seem to be kinks to work out and this feature isn’t worth much until the software gets smarter.

There are two other areas of Wesabe. The first is “Tips”. Basically they look at your tags and match you with other users who have written tips on those items (You can write tips too!). Think of a message boards built around tag names. This is an interesting idea to provide relevant advice about my spending and savings but when I tested it there wasn’t much advice for me and it wasn’t very relevant to me.

The last tab on Wesabe is “Goals”. Users can create goals or subscribe to other users’ goals. Again these are like message boards based around specific goals. Again this is an interesting idea but my goals of “lower spending” and “buy a house” (rated as some of the most popular goals on Wesabe) didn’t have a lot posted.

In time as the community grows, Wesabe could become more helpful but I see a chicken and egg issue here. I am not likely to come back to Wesabe until it provides more value and it won’t provide more value until there is more content or more features. I felt the same way when I used Socialpicks. I would like these two to merger to build a really solid community of knowledgeable people who want control of their money.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 11:37 pm and is filed under social networking, money, community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.