I received a lot of great responses from my last finance-related post, so I thought I would try my hand at another. Disclaimer: DO NOT take financial advice from me! I'm the worst!!! However, that is the same reason why I am trying to learn how to be better with money, be friends with money, make peace with money, roll around in money... wait, got carried away for a second there!
Onward.
A while back, I decided to dip my toes in the waters of personal finance websites. I know there are several but Geezeo and Mint were the 2 top contenders that had been kicking around in my brain. After a few "Geezeo vs. Mint" google searches, it became somewhat more apparent that Geezeo was the direction to head (by a nose).
A few months ago, I created an account on Geezeo and set up my bank accounts and one credit card. I felt a little weird about putting my personal information out there, but Geezeo claims to be secure. I have to be honest, I set it up several months ago and didn't visit again until this past weekend. I decided to set up ALL of my accounts on there (I've got several). The only card they were missing was my Macy's store card. No big deal.
Time to plan my budget. This is where the experience went off the rails for me. I totally didn't get it. I entered my income and realized it was incorrect, but I could NOT figure out how to update it. There was no edit button, no undo, no nothing. I clicked all over the place, and resorted to submitting a support ticket. That was Saturday. They did get back to me by Sunday and pointed out that I could update my income on my profile page (or settings? I don't remember). I updated it, but I still didn't really know what I was doing.
I was also distracted by the community aspects that I couldn't immediately relate to. Even though I am going out on a limb here and talking about my finances on my blog, I think it's actually a really personal thing, and I seriously doubt I would twitter my personal spending habits to all my followers.
During that period of waiting, I got antsy and decided to check out Mint. First impressions hit me over the head. The site grabbed me a little quicker, from the design to the ease of adding accounts (ALL of them). Within minutes I was able to take a look at all my spending habits, and see an interactive pie chart to see what was going where. I started making new labels and categories and updating anything that my bank improperly labeled. I found out that I have spent A LOT of money at a local mexican restaurant that I like to frequent as well as Zappos (no surprise there). I was hooked.
Now this is not a post intended to trash Geezeo. I think they are really trying to engage with the community and get people to be more comfortable with taking control of their finances. Once I really got pulled in by Mint, I reacted strongly and deleted my Geezeo account pronto. The truth is, I still feel really uncomfortable about having so many of my personal accounts all tied to one place. I didn't like the idea of this occurring in 2 places.
Ironically, Sunday night I got a new follower on Twitter: Peter Glyman, the co-founder of Geezeo. Yep, following me on twitter, wanting to know about my experience so far, and quickly discovering that I had abandoned it. He wanted to know what kind of feedback I had in order to want to continue on as a member. And I guess that means I might have to continue playing with it.
If Peter hadn't reached out to me personally, I think I may have gone full speed ahead with Mint. But I am compelled to continue to play around with both and report back with more concrete findings.
Anyone out there have any experiences with either site, or perhaps another? Please share in the comments!
