As I mentioned in the last update (which was way too long ago), things are a bit hectic. I’m looking forward to adding a new section on the site to share just what I mean in the near future. In the meantime, please excuse the plain Wordpress template while we migrate Boomtrends to the new site. Also, as I mentioned we are looking for guest contributors to Boomtrends. Today’s post is from Apurva…enjoy!
If you’re like me, you have trouble remembering things like: Do I owe anyone money? Do they owe me anything? I remember lending Freakonomics to someone, but who? I have Entourage Season 1, but who did I borrow it from? For questions like this, BillMonk provides a great little utility.
Their goal is to “…defuse the financial tensions between friends by providing a tool that manages social money in a way that is easy and fair. Use BillMonk when you need to track money and there isn’t a better way.”
Or, as Hamlet put it, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend.” Um. let’s just move on.
To start, you can add your friends via your Facebook account, an excel spreadsheet, or manually with email addresses. Your friends don’t even have to go through the setup process to get an account. If they choose not to, they’ll receive an email message or text message whenever you mention them in your account.
The site itself provides two unique tools. First, it allows you to track who owes you money, and whom you owe money to. If your friends have accounts, whenever one of you makes an entry mentioning the other in a transaction, the information will be shown in your view. To settle these transactions, you can either pay them in person (duh), or you can sign up for an Obopay account (who coincidentally just bought out BillMonk). Once you have your bank account linked to Obopay, you just click on the amount you owe someone and the money will be transferred. Conversely, if someone owes you money, the amount will show up in your account. Of course there’s a service charge for all this: 10 cents to send money and 1.5% to load cash into your account.
I like the way BillMonk keeps track of all of the various transactions a user has with different people, and the current amount owed at any given time. For instance, if I buy dinner for Rob and we decide to split the $100 bill, and later I owe him $8 for coffee, BillMonk knows that he only owes me a total of $42. When I tell BillMonk that he’s paid me $20, it automatically lowers the amount owed to me to $22.
Although not really a part of the site, Obopay also offers a mobile service that lets you transfer money to your friends through your cell phone via SMS messaging. While I haven’t used this feature yet, I think it has some far-reaching potential. How often do you go to dinner and there’s someone who didn’t bring enough money, so they offer up their credit card, while most of the other people are looking for change because they only have 20 dollar bills?
Using Obopay’s mobile service (or even PayPal’s mobile service), you could easily settle bills right at the table just with a simple text message. For the user who chooses to manage all of his money and transactions through BillMonk, it’s an easy process to download transaction history from Quicken or any other utility that enables CSV functionality. It even provides the capability to ‘tag’ your expenses for easier historical navigation.
While the payment feature is the most popular feature of this site, BillMonk also allows users to set up libraries of all the ’stuff’ they have, focusing primarily on books and DVDs. Using this feature, you can browse your friends’ libraries and ‘check-out’ and ‘check-in’ stuff. The process of going through your actual libraries and inputting them manually is a bit tedious, but it is cool to see what all your other friends have. Instead of rushing out to buy something, you could just as easily find a friend of yours that has it and is willing to lend it out to you.
Now, admittedly, this may seem like a lot of work to keep track of your money and things, and it probably is overkill for easygoing people who are good about paying people back and remembering who has their stuff, but if you have a forgetful set of friends, BillMonk might just be what you’re looking for. As for me, though, I still have no idea who I borrowed Entourage from.
and use Kiva.org, a site that facilitates P2P microfinancing AKA adopting a developing world business . It works like the sponsor a child programs that we see infomercials for, however by giving to these loans you are practicing my friend Jammy’s motto: “You buy a man a burger he eats for a day; you find that man a job he eats for a while.”
When you have selected the business to donate to, you can even subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on the business! Also, after a little bit of poking on Kiva’s site, I found that the repayment rate on these loans are upwards of 95%. And if you’re just not quite VC material, and the business you chose fails, just think of it as a donation to a good cause.
Here is the link to the business I chose to give to, please contribute too! However if you are a grinch this holiday season and want to make money off your loans, give Prosper.com a try. It’s a site where you can bid on loans, like on eBay. Here’s the NY Times article covering the launch earlier this year.
Happy Holidays!
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.
The days of free love and hippies are gone and it’s nearly impossible to get picked up by sticking out the trusty ol’ thumb anymore. However, if you are a free lovin’ hippie missing the good ol’ days or a n00b like me, the newly launched Hitchsters.com has brought hitching to the 21st century, using the trusty cellphone and the good ol’ net.
The concept is simple, go to their site, enter your flight information (departing/arriving), select where you are taking the cab to/from, and whether you would rather ride with a dude/chick/either. Pop in your email and cellphone number, and they’ll send you an email and text with the person you are supposed to coordinate cabs with. Then you’re on your own to figure it all out: who’s picking who up, where to meet, when to leave, etc. etc. There is one rule though: the first one out pays 60% of the fare. As it says on their FAQs the reason for this is basically so that the last guy out doesn’t get screwed for the tip.
This all sounds great so far, until I read how they paired you up. They will only match you with people who are on the same flight as you and are travelling to/from the same neighborhood as you. Think about it this way: There are about 200 people on a sold out flight, of those 200 people, how many of those people are coincidentally going to the same area of the city you are, and how many of those people also signed up on Hitchsters.com? Not many. So with these matching rules, it seems pretty tough to get a match going. Of course, the site just launched about 5 days ago, so when more people starting using the site, making these matches will be a lot easier, so spread the word.
Hitchsters.com service is currently only available in NYC to and from JFK/La Guardia/Newark, but they are hoping to expand to other airports soon. However I would love to see some of this hippie/taxi co-op action from one part of the city to another, like for example being able to get on my phone and putting in a request at 11pm after a few pints to get from one bar to the next, or maybe making that trek home from the bars after closing time, I’m sure those rides would make one helluva adventure. Hitchsters.com, where you at?!?! Get more people on your site! I don’t want to pay the full $45 to get to and from JFK anymore!!!
P.S. Boomtrenders heading out to NY or coming home from NY - show Hitchsters.com some love and let us know if it worked out for you, and crazy cab stories are always welcomed!
