5.24.2007

Wesabe is social financial management for your personal life





I'm taking a look at Wesabe, a social financial management tool that starts like Quicken (financial tracking) and ends like Amazon (purchase recommendation). You connect all of your savings accounts, credit card accounts, and money market accounts to Wesabe, and it imports all of your transactions. You then go through your transactions and begin to tag them with labels such as 'restaurant' 'cable payment' 'savings' or 'vacation'. As you label transactions, Wesabe searches through your account and labels all of the same transactions with those labels. You also share information with everyone else using Wesabe, so if a restaurant is already tagged by a Chase bank user on Wesabe, it can already tell you that the transaction is a particular restaurant.

Once you've done this, you can view your history by tag and account - you can see how much you're spending on food versus movies, or how much you're saving. You also can see recommendations on where you might want to shop based on where you are currently eating or purchasing things (based on the Wesabe community's transactions).

By the way - I read about this a while ago, but was skeptical to try it out. Handing over all of my bank account information seemed incredibly sketchy. However, this is where social trust factors come in. I try things that people I trust and respect recommend, starting with Fred Wilson, who is having a great experience with Wesabe. Read how he uses it and see the pictures of the interface right now on his blog.







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