This is most certainly the time for financial management tools to attract new users. Financial advisors have for years said that people need to get their personal budget in order before anything else. Well, now two things are colliding: the financial crisis and an array of innovative online money management apps to help budget and track personal finances. Rudder.com is one of these services and provides powerful but easy-to-use financial tools to help you meet your life goals.
To be fully effective at organizing your money you need to budget your spending: know precisely how much money you have going out and coming in. Rudder does this by allowing users to manage all of their bank accounts in one place. Users can set up bill reminders to avoid late fees and the ensuing dip in credit rating if you’re late paying a bill, as well as know how much money you have left to spend at the end of every month. The most unique feature of Rudder is its ability to deliver all of your financial updates via a dashboard that is emailed to you. Often the biggest failure point for online finance tools is the fact that most people forget to log into the website often enough to alter their spending. With Rudder, your alerts and spending summaries are sent directly to your email inbox so you can’t hide from your habits.
You can’t do much better than Rudder, even with the fair number of alternatives. Tracking monthly finances and seeing not just how much you’re spending, but how quickly you’re burning through your savings, is very useful. Rudder is a strong contender for one of the best money apps out there.
Practical Uses:
- Visually see your financial “burn rate” and determine if you will have enough money to pay your upcoming bills
- Manage business expenses by combining expense accounts/business credit cards all in one place
- More effectively track your entertainment expenses so you can work towards saving more of your hard-earned money
- Use Rudder to manage your household budget and give visibility to your spouse who may not be handling the day-to-day expenses
Insider Tips:
- Use the budget software to track how much you’ll have in the future based on last months bills, so you won’t ever overspend
- Create a VERY strong password – with numbers, upper and lowercase, to ensure increased security
- Make sure that your email program can handle HTML (rich text messages) such as Gmail or Yahoo – this will ensure you get the full benefit of Rudder’s recap emails
- Add widgets to your Rudder home page, depending on the nature of your accounts, such as a bill widget that lists your monthly bills and their due dates
What we liked:
- It’s a well-designed and maintained site that costs nothing to use
- It has access to over 500 banks – both mainstream and obscure. If your bank isn’t listed, you can ask Rudder to investigate adding it to their database
- It’s a secure site, which may be the most important feature for an application that accesses financial records
What we didn’t like:
- No current iPhone support or native application – short of viewing your Rudder emails
Alternatives:
- Buxfer: http://www.buxfer.com
- Geezeo.com – http://www.geezeo.com
- Mint – http://www.mint.com
- Thrive – http://justthrive.com
- Wesabe http://www.wesabe.com
Company Info:
- Launched: 2008
- Privately Held
- Headquarters: Houston, TX
- Founded by: Nikhil Roy
- Web site: http://www.rudder.com
Costs:
- Free
All articles are curated and personally reviewed by Dave Onkels. Dave is tech addict and has a passion for rich web applications. He has cultivated several tech startups and runs
Henry – Thanks for the post. We certainly appreciate it. Just wanted to let you know that we do have iPhone App.
Go figure, once something comes that does what you want, it disappears.
The last day of operation for Rudder is October 31, 2010.
I just recieved an email from them about it.
Rudder has been valuable. The website articles are great, only dropped in for a quick read and ended up reading a lot more. Thankyou and keep up the great feeds.
this is great on iphone apps. Keep on sharing good post.