I am always interested in how others manage their personal cash flow, so I’ve decided to share how I do it. Ultimately, which accounts your money flows through matters less than where it flows to, but recently I’ve found utilizing multiple bank accounts actually makes keeping to a budget easier. [...]

If you have decided to start a personal budget or want to follow your budget more faithfully, perhaps you’re considering software to help get the job done. Mvelopes Personal, by software developer In2M, is one of three major choices for personal finance software along with Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft Money. As described in this review, however, Mvelopes is substantially different than its competition. [...]

How many times have you written out a monthly budget that would make your bank proud, only to completely forget about it one week later as you charge the day’s third coffee to your Visa card? [...]

Wondering what ING Direct’s Electric Orange Debit MasterCard looks like? I just got mine in the mail, here’s a glimpse! [...]

Your car. You love it when it takes you to work or through winding mountains on a weekend escape. When it comes time for oil changes and tune-ups, however, your car stereo plays a different tune.

For many even minor car repairs can put a dent in your wallet, let alone the inevitable but unpredictable major system failures. When you bust a radiator, fuel pump, alternator, clutch or AC compressor, it will be the mechanic – not your car – taking you for a ride. [...]

Could you buy nothing for an entire year? Each year AdBusters promotes Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving to raise awareness about wasteful consumer habits. But what about a Buy Nothing Year? That’s exactly what this group has pledged to do in 2007. [...]

Late in 2006, ING announced to its ING Direct Savings customers the Electronic Orange checking account. It takes free checking a step further and actually pays at least 3% interest on your balance, however small.

Could high yield checking accounts be the future of banking?

True, Electronic Orange is a paperless checking account, meaning you can’t get physical checks in the mail. But I don’t know about you, but for me that is becoming less and less of a problem. With online bill paying, the only check I write each month is for my rent, and I’m willing to bet if I really wanted to I could convince my landlord to let me pay him electronically.

And those archaic checks aside, ING offers everything else you would expect from a checking account, most importantly free ATM access and a MasterCard debit card. They also provide bill paying and electronic check writing services for free.

If you’re a big spender, the interest rates are just as good or better than most high yield savings accounts (5.30% APY on every dollar for balances of $100,000 or more and 5.05% APY on balances between $50,000 and $100,000). For everybody else, it’s 3.0%. Still, that’s a heck of a lot better than what I currently earn on my checking account…Zilch!

As of right now, you first need to be an ING Direct savings customer to sign up. But if you haven’t done so already, there’s no reason not to grab an ING Direct Account an earn an instant 10% return on your money. (You get a $25 bonus when you open an account of $250 or more). So open an ING Direct account now and then sign up for their high yield checking account to start earning returns on your checking balance!

Dreaming of a Merry Christmas and a debt-free New Year? Jotting down a holiday shopping budget before you hit the stores is a must. If you haven’t been saving diligently all year for holiday shopping, you can still keep your credit cards on a short reign as you work through your shopping list. Here are the steps to sticking to your holiday shopping budget: [...]

Online personal finance tools can show all your bank, investment, and loan accounts on one webpage and – soon – may provide Quicken-like budgeting power you can access anywhere. So where are they?

While existing online personal finance tools are mostly limited to bill paying, August 2006 research from Online Banking Report states “Banks and credit unions looking to bolster customer retention…are expected to adopt…key features in Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken.”

Expect these suckers to start popping up like dandelions.

Until then, current online personal finance tools can’t compete with personal finance software (or even a good budget spreadsheet). But again, in five years we’ll wonder how we balanced our virtual checkbooks without them.

What Is Already Here?

Yodlee is my vote for top current provider of online personal finance tools. Yodlee serves several major-league clients including Fidelity, Wachovia, and Bank of America.

This weekend I was fiddling with my 401k and took a look at Fidelity Full View, powered by Yodlee. After about ten minutes of setup, Full View put all of my bank, investment, and loan accounts on one page and automatically tallied my net worth. Full View also let me view recent transactions in each account and summarized periodic account inflows and outflows. Full View can also provide previews of multiple e-mail accounts and electronic bill paying.

Setting up Full View was easy; I choose most of my accounts from Yodlee’s database of over 8,000 financial institutions (including my local credit union) and simply entered each username and password. Gaining access to my ING Direct account was the only tricky part. ING asked a barrage of security questions and locked me out until I omitted the comma from my birth city and state.

Full View is a convenient tool, and I will definitely return to get an instant net worth snapshot, but Full View lacks the Yodlee Personal Finance function that would enable expense tracking, budgeting, and account balance forecasting. I welcome comments from anybody that has tried these features.

If you’d like to use Yodlee applications yourself, you’ll need an account with one of Yodlee’s Clients.

What’s Coming

BillQ is a free online bill reminder service from Seen Creative. Right now BillQ simply allows you to create a queue of your monthly bills so you don’t forget to pay them, but BillQ’s user interface is extraordinary. I will be keeping an eye on BillQ over the next couple of years. Should it evolve into a more advanced online personal finance tool with the same awesome usability, I’ll be sold.

What’s not to love?

It’s hard to pooh-pooh the idea of being able to manage myriad accounts, bills, and budgets from one webpage, but there’s a primary reason such sites don’t yet exist.

Security.

Of course, the idea of collecting every single one of your financial accounts in one location is scary. Identity thieves have proven they need far less than a few account numbers to clean somebody out.

I believe, however, online personal finance tools are simply the newest frontier for Internet security.

Ten years ago most people cringed at the thought of using a credit card online. Yet in 2005 we spent over $175 billion shopping online, paying almost exclusively with plastic.

Online-only banks like ING faced similar resistance. Critics of ING said nobody would trust sending funds to a bank they couldn’t see, yet ING Direct now has over 15 million customers.

As my experience accessing my ING Direct account through Fidelity Full View shows, however, ING has responded to security concerns with elaborate security measures; something that creators of online personal finance tools may have to mirror without becoming tedious. After all, with Quicken, Money, and Excel always available, convenience is the name of the game.

Sites providing online personal finance tools must prove that they can securely display and analyze more financial data more easily than our current systems. When they do, it will be an exciting day for personal finance nerds.

Creating a monthly budget when you are in your twenties presents unique challenges and requires different priorities than budgeting at any other time in your life. But whether you are living at home for a few years, out on your own for the first time, or eking through graduate school, budgeting is more important in your twenties than at any other time. [...]