Tools for keeping up with all that "paper" (the green and the white kind)

Last night I had dinner with my kids and my mother. She was asking me to help her get some new software for her computer for word processing and personal finance. She and I both have used MS money over the years and both of us are throughly disgusted by the cost and yearly upgrades that have become necessary. She mentioned that she had to purchase the latest MS Money in order to access her older MS money files.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of love for the home team. That company and its employees have created their own kingdom in Redmond. They are printing their own money out there with Bill Gates's face on it. Not to mention that they make up a significant portion of our local economy through consumption and traffic. Without them, there would be no need for a drive through Starbucks and dog spas. But MS has gotten a little crazy with the now required Money upgrades at $50 or more a pop.

So I have decided to get off the MS Money bandwagon and search for a suitable system that doesn't require as much set up, provides more useful features and has a cheaper price tag. My search yielded a worthy contender which I promptly shared with my mother over dinner.
I have converted to Yodlee. Yodlee offers online banking services, bill pay and account aggregation for many of the largest banks as a service for their bank customers. It is a product marketed as directly to financial institutions. However, you can sign up as a consumer independently of your bank as I did and use it like you would MS Money. It is the best thing since sliced bread.

Why you ask? First and foremost, it's free! Secondly, its web based. I can view the current status of all of my accounts, pay bills, view my net worth and analyze my monthly spend rate from a web browser or my mobile phone. I can't do that with MS Money or any other software application. It helps categorize my transactions which is a huge time-saver. In MS Money, that task alone could take hours if I neglected this too long. Which would also impact my ability to see where I stood at any given point in the month. Now it takes minutes, because most of the time Yodlee has intelligently categorized things based on the transaction data or uses some custom rules that I have built.

Check it out! Here is the demo of Yodlee.com
Here is how you sign-up.