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Managing Your Money

In Public View
A Slew of New Web Sites Are Trying to Attract Young People By Combining Social Networking With Personal Finance It used to be that people shied away from sharing intimate details about their financial lives.

Now, amid the rising popularity of social-networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, a crop of new personal-finance Web sites is letting users post their private personal-finance details and share advice with each other on tracking their spending and making better investment decisions.

YOUNG MONEY SERIES
• Financial Planning for the Not-Yet-Rich

Josh Young, a 26-year-old environmental engineer from Cincinnati, decided to try out Wesabe after reading about it in various blogs. He wanted to pay off his credit-card debt and the two car loans that he and his wife shared, and he expected the site would help identify areas where he and his wife were overspending. But he also got help from other users who shared their own tips on reducing debt and cutting spending. "One of our goals was to pay off all our debt, and we're almost there," says Mr. Young.

Some consumers may have security concerns about sending their personal financial information to a Web site. In general, the sites say their systems are protected against identity thieves and are just as safe as banking online. Wesabe, for its part, stresses that it doesn't store users' login information on its servers and screens out any personal information from the data to protect users' privacy.

The type of information you need to enter into these sites -- and how public that information becomes -- depends on the site and what you want to get out of it. At Geezeo, for example, users provide their passwords for their bank and credit-card accounts, which the site uses to automatically pull users' data into its systems. At Wesabe, users download a software program onto their computer and then enter their passwords. The program then pulls their data from the banks to users' computers, and then uploads it to Wesabe's computers.

At both sites, users' data is kept private, although members can voluntarily share more information about themselves with other people. The sites will also aggregate user information to reveal spending patterns in the community -- such as the average amount users spend on gas -- but will not disclose individual data.

At other sites, such as the just-launched Covestor LLC, which allow investors to share their portfolio information, members manually input transaction data for their brokerage accounts or provide their account passwords to have the firm automatically track their trades. Members can choose to remain anonymous, and the actual dollar values of trades and specific holdings of each member always remains confidential, with only percentages displayed.

Still other sites, with names such as Buxfer.com and BillMonk.com, help college roommates, friends and family members keep running tallies of shared expenses. At the same time, some smaller brokerage firms, such as TradeKing and Zecco Holdings Inc.'s Zecco.com, are letting clients share information about their holdings, recent trades and investment strategies with other users if they choose.

04.09.2007. 07:30

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