New Smart Budgeting Tools to Help Organize your Finances

There have been all kinds of budgeting tools available in the past that have tried to help with personal finance - they would go as far as trying to help you manage your money, and they would try to offer advice on which financial products to choose from. Today's new age budgeting tools though would take their role a little more seriously still and try to be your financial planner as well. Here's how.

Consider the new service HelloWallet (of course, the two words of the name are capitalized and written together, as is the fashion these days). As a budgeting service, it taps in into the services provided by Mint.com, to give you everything you need to track where your money gets spent. But something that merely brings you Mint.com is hardly useful - you could easily go to Mint yourself.. What HelloWallet brings to the table is its offer of personalized financial plans for your life, for your dreams. Whatever it is that you wish to plan for later in life, a home, college education for a child, retirement, or anything else, HelloWallet will ask for all the information it needs to draw up a plan for you, and then there you will have your own personalized estimate for how much you need to save each month.

The personalized estimate isn't some hastily totted up figure either. If you went to HelloWallet to help plan for a house you wish to buy, the program would look up the prices that homes go for in your local area, it would extrapolate to what such an investment is likely to be worth a few years from now, and then it would tell you where your current savings plans don't cut it. And it isn't just going to tell you how to buy a home either; the budgeting tools that come with HelloWallet are quite self-contained. If while you are planning for your home, you aren't going inadequate job planning for, say, your health or anything else, it's going to pull you up then and there. As popular as Mint.com is, it just gives you the budgeting tools. When you use something like HelloWallet, you get a money management advisor. And if it will help you trust it more than Mint to hear this piece of information, HelloWallet is a business that runs on your subscriptions - not on advertiser dollars from banks, like Mint.

HelloWallet isn't meant for the upper-middle-class or for someone who's trying to see if $100,000 extension to the house would be a good investment. This is for the rest of us - people who are trying to get two dollars to rub together, to do something important. HelloWallet is actually so focused on the lower end of the income curve that they are giving away hundreds of thousands of free subscriptions to poor families, and the Rockefeller foundation is paying for a few thousand free subscriptions on HelloWallet for income-challenged Americans as well. Among the other prominent budgeting tools there are to choose from is the Wall Street Journal's LifePlan. It doesn't actually do all the work for you; it just asks you a bunch of questions about your financial situation, and then it'll serve up articles and tutorials just to help you achieve the aims you put down their questionnaire.

Some people are quite wary of these free budgeting tools. Services like JLPlanner from a few years ago have attracted a lot of criticism for risky financial advice; and the tools you will find at investment websites that belong to the Vanguard or Fidelity, are often quite bare of features. Other services like ESPlanner.com have a dedicated niche following though. It really depends on what works for you; you can probably look around a bit, and find services that are just right for you.