The advice might be there but sometimes people don’t know it or just don’t see it applying to them. Then there are the people who find themselves in unexpected circumstances (unexpected expenses, loss of job, injury, etc) that need a little more help and need it suited towards their financial situation.

It might be out there for free but it requires you to investigate what advice is good and/or suits you or how to make it work for you. Getting people to comment and discuss your options might be helpful to them.

Cheers!

People do spend a lot, and in ways that don’t often make sense. Whatever gets people away from those traps (not paying off credit cards, buying stuff on credit, buying more than they need, etc) is good. But I would be surprised if lots of that advice didn’t already exist on the Intartubes, free of charge.

e

Thanks for stopping by and responding to some of my thoughts. Your points are all well taken. And for the sake of clarity, I have to mention that I didn’t intend for my original ramble to imply that you’re selling “nonymous” personal data.

As for your comment on tips and graphs: they aren’t something I find value in. I don’t think that people save money by spending where items are cheap, I think people save money by buying less and putting more money out of their own reach. That’s just my view, and I know lots of folks will disagree with it. Once you’ve made your millions with Wesabe, and you decide that you can’t live without me as your user, consider putting together an investment site that allows users to compare financial products, and critiques their accounts from a goal-oriented and tax specific perspective.

As a slight aside: since you’re charging users $5/month, Wesabe has to be able to save them at least $5/month for the account to be financially worth it. I know that my buying patterns are fairly static. I doubt that the information Wesabe provides will be able to save me $5/month consistently.

And to respond to your point about Quicken, you are correct: people store their credentials in the silliest and least secure of places. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to. The reward is fairly low (graphs+tips), while the risk is fairly high (losing most of my liquid assets).

Like I say, I don’t think that Wesabe is necessarily a bad thing, it just doesn’t meet my needs. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there are plenty of people who don’t share opinion.

Thanks for the note about USAA. It’s nice to see that financial institutions are moving towards technical sanity. I’m not aware of any Canadian banks doing the same thing, but I’ll be happy to switch my account when they do.

Good luck with Wesabe!

e

Having said that, if I was worried about my finances I’d probably go to my bank and some friends I have that work in banks for free advice that doesn’t seem as risky.

I’m one of the founders of Wesabe, so I thought I’d respond a bit and make the company a little less anonymous.

First, I agree that our privacy policy needs to be improved, but nowhere do we say that we’re selling anyone’s data. We’re not. We say that we share aggregated data, which is true: any user can get it for free on any page we host. *None* of that data is personally identifiable — we don’t say “Josh shops at grovery store X and has $2,000 in debt.” Instead, we say that the average checkout price at Safeway is $X and Whole Foods is $Y, so you can compare what you might expect to spend at different stores. Safeway and Whole Foods are probably obvious, but when you’re comparing auto repair shops, knowing the average price and the satisfaction rating from prior customers gives you good data to choose the shop you want.

While our privacy policy needs a revision, there’s nothing nefarious in it — it just needs to be more clear. Our “Data Bill of Rights,” though, is perfectly clear and unambiguous — take a look:

http://www.wesabe.com/page/security

Second, your criticism of the Uploader is a little odd given your article title, since that’s our least Web 2.0 feature of all. You are certainly correct that there are security risks to keeping financial data on your computer, but how is that any different than using Quicken on your computer, which people have been doing for 20 years now? Quicken does exactly the same thing we do with downloading your financial data. I think our model is actually better on your point, since your own computer only holds credentials and not your full transaction history in our model, whereas Quicken holds credentials *and* history on your machine.

Finally, sorry to hear you don’t like the graphs or tips, but I would say that many other users have told us they are getting a huge amount out of them, and out of using tags and goal targets to organize their financial data. If you have something you’d like to see added to the product to make your data more useful, I’d love to hear any suggestions you have.

I appreciate the criticism, and hope the response is helpful. If there are more questions you’d like me to address, I’m happy to do so here or in email — marc@wesabe.com.

Best,
Marc