Personal finance 2.0: A wealth of new Web apps

Using the Web to manage your money used to mean logging into a plethora of banks and other institutions to check balances and maybe pay bills. Now various next-generation Web services are building on these basics by offering one-stop account tracking plus tools and advice to help you stick to a budget, reach financial goals, or cope with money problems.

Services such as Green Sherpa, Rudder, and Thrive target younger folks who are new to money management and are comfortable giving a third-party service access to their online account information, but who have little interest in traditional desktop tools such as Intuit's Quicken and Microsoft's Money. These services join pioneers Finicity (formerly Mvelopes), Mint.com, Wesabe, and Yodlee in providing so-called account aggregation, meaning that they can download information from multiple online accounts and use it to create a unified picture of your finances.

All of them also provide at least some means of categorizing transactions (sometimes automatically) to help you figure out where the money is going. But they differ in how they try to help your financial situation and whether they're supported by fees or by referrals and ads.

Green Sherpa, for example, plans to charge US$8 a month ($6 if you prepay for a year) for tracking accounts and for projecting what your finances will look like in the future based in part on downloaded historical data and on your own projections for expenses and income (say, a major vacation or a fat bonus check). Green Sherpa's Sharing features make it one of the first personal finance apps where you can chat with someone--a spouse, a CPA, or a financial planner--while both of you view your financial data.

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