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Yodlee - Best Personal Financial Management ToolPosted by ahc99 on September 28th, 2008

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Yodlee Logo

I have been using Yodlee MoneyCenter for about a year now and so far it is working out great! Yodlee MoneyCenter is the personal financial management tool that is produced by Yodlee. Generally Yodlee caters to large businesses but they have a special portal in which individual users can sign up for their free service of managing basically all of their financial information at one website.

Just to give you a little background, Yodlee is a company located at Redwood City, CA and they provide account aggregation and other online financial services to many different institutions. Yodlee lets their users see their checking, saving, investment accounts, retirement accounts, loans, mortgages, rewards, emails, and house values all on one screen at one website. Then in June 27, 2006 they started providing the same kind of account aggregation service (previously only available for large businesses) to individual users at Yodlee MoneyCenter.

Although some people may have concerns about giving out their online financial usernames and passwords all to one company, I believe it should be safe because many online portals of the larger businesses you use are actually powered by Yodlee. For example, if you use Bank of America online then the My Portfolio service is powered by Yodlee. Some of the biggest businesses powered by Yodlee include the aforementioned Bank of America, ING, Fidelity, HSBC, E*TRADE, etc… and there are many more. Even fellow account aggregator service Mint is powered by Yodlee.

I personally love using Yodlee, not only because it is safe, but it helps me keep track of my accounts all at one place. That way I don’t need to log in to 5+ websites in order to check each and every one of my balances. In addition, once Yodlee gets all of the information, you can tell it to give you more useful information such as a net worth statement, graphs to analyze your spending, categorization of your expenses, and comparison of actual spending to set budgets. I also like how you can tell it to send email alerts to you when certain events happen (eg. a bill is due, unusual account activity, high balance, etc…).

I usually access Yodlee about once or twice a month to check my net worth statement and to analyze the graph that displays how much each account has change from the last time I logged in. That tool itself has been invaluable to me because sometimes it can be difficult to get a clear overall picture of all your finances. Sure, you might know how much you have in Bank of America or your retirement accounts, but do you really know what your overall net worth is? I do and I think that is important in keeping you motivated to save more for the future. When you see your net worth increasing month by month and year by year, you know you are doing something right and it definitely empowers you.

Is It Better to Buy or Rent?Posted by ahc99 on September 3rd, 2008

Tool by New York Times

In today’s unsure housing markets I still see people grabbing housing opportunities hoping to have landed buys at a market bottom. I personally know three people that have scooped up either foreclosed or bank-owned houses in the last month. It’s understandable though, they wanted to move out of their rental homes/apartments and finally live the American dream by moving into a house. But truthfully? I think doing that right now is like investing in the financial market, you are trying to catch a falling knife. You just don’t know if you’re gonna screw yourself over later on. Of course, if you find a really good deal (and I mean really good) then I say go for it. But there’s a couple of things you need to keep in mind if you decide to go from renting to buying:

• Mortgages are harder to get now and so the Interest Rate you need to accept and/or points you need to pay are greater, making the loan even more expensive than before.
• You need to pay property tax, an expense you wouldn’t need to pay as a renter. In addition, in an overpriced housing market (which it still is, ortherwise it wouldn’t be called a buyer’s market) the amount you are paying for property tax is also exaggerated.
• You need to pay for property insurance
• Maintenance/Repair fees, which can be much greater than you expected… especially if you bought an REO or foreclosed house since the prior tenants have little incentive to upkeep the house (I’ve already read horror stories of smashed walls, broken windows, stolen sinks and bathtubs).
• AND most importantly, house prices are still falling (the inventory of unsold homes just keeps on increases every month) so even if everything else is okay, you don’t want to be stuck with a home that has a more expensive mortgage than it can be sold on the open market.

However, if you find a good house on the market and are torn between renting and buying, a good place to start is with this tool that the New York Times had created to help you calibrate which would be a better path to take.

Mortgage CalculatorPosted by ahc99 on September 3rd, 2008

Tool by BankRate

One of the best tools I use online is the Mortgage Calculator that can be found at Bankrate.com. I use it every time I find a good housing deal (REO, foreclosure, FSBO, etc…). Basically, to use it you input the following information:

• Mortgage amount (the total amount you have borrowed)
• Mortgage term (the length of time you have to pay off the loan)
• Interest rate (the exact annual interest rate of your mortgage)
• Mortgage start date (when you took out your mortgage)

From this the calculator will output your monthly payment and present an amortization table showing how much of the loan you owe after every passing month and when it gets paid off (hopefully it decreases per month and you didn’t get just an interest-only or balloon payment loan).

In addition, one of the advantages of using this calculator is that you have the option of seeing how extra payments can affect your overall loan amortization. It lets you add extra money to your monthly mortgage payment on a recurring monthly basis, yearly basis, or one time basis. I can’t tell you how useful that tool has been in calculating our own home mortgage. Every time we have extra money to use, we go to this website tool and check how our loan would be affected if we used the money to pay off the mortgage. Usually after doing that we have enough motivation to not spend the money on a big screen TV or vacation and instead we use it to just pay off our loan.