How I Organize My Money – See All Spending in One Place
I wrote about saving accounts and CDs to earn more interests, that’s one side of the money flow (input). The other side is spending (output). To grow money, we want to increase input and reduce unnecessary output. I’m a data guy, so, I believe the best way to reduce spendings is to track and visualize them first.
I tried several tools to track my money flow. I want to see all my transactions in one place. I first used personal capital (now acquired by Empower) and it was a bad experience. I had to re-sync many of my accounts every time, the UI is difficult to use, I also used its financial advisory service and it was terrible (I’m writing another article about Robo-Advisors to talk about it). I found Truebill (also acquired by Rocket Money) later and I really like it. It uses Plaid to sync with my accounts and it’s robust. It has clear and simple UI. Its well-designed mobile app (please see the screenshot below) allows me to add my cash spending right away. It was Mobile-First design, but the web app is catching up now. It has rules for me to automate the categorization of my spendings. I can see the aggregate view by week, month, quarter, or year. Now I see all transactions from my credit card, checking, and saving accounts in one place. It shows a comprehensive view of how I spent my money. So, I can make data driven financial decisions (like how much should I keep for the Rainy Day Fund, what is my average retirement spendings, etc.)
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Rocket Money also allows me to add investment accounts and assets like real estate properties, so I can see my “Net Worth”. It is a new feature so I’m not as familiar with it. Like its web app, I believe it will get better through iterations. It would be nice to see all my assets and debt in one place and perceive the trend of my net worth.
With the maturity of Open Banking and fintech data aggregators, more and more companies (like fidelity, betterment, vanguard, mint) provide the similar functionalities. With more competition, I hope the day to see the full view of my money data is coming soon. Before that, Rocket Money is a good tool for me to understand and control the spending part of it.