Have you ever wondered exactly where your money goes each month? Budgets can be just like those New Year’s resolution diets many of us start each year - we stick to it for a week or two, but somehow it just doesn’t seem to get results in the long term.

It is a difficult task to set realistic financial goals, and then track exactly where you’re spending your hard earned money. But if you had a free, easy to use online tool to help you pull together all your financial activities in one place, this might be just the ticket to get you on the path to achieving some true progress with your budgeting and financial goals.  

There are a number of websites that offer free tools that can help you do just that through linking to your bank accounts and credit cards, and downloading the information into a single, easy-to-use interface. Using these tools, you can analyze how, when and where you spend your money using easy to understand charts or graphs. Additionally, many of these sites offer a method where you can set up an alert that will warn you when you’re about to exceed your budget or overdraw an account.

We did a little research to find some of the best free personal finance management tools out there in cyberspace. I’m sure there are others out there but here is a list of five of the most popular ones:

Mint.com: This seems to be the most well-known free site, and offers some pretty neat tools. According to their website, they connect to over 8,000 financial institutions, with daily updates. The program breaks down your expenditures into such categories as groceries, credit card payments, student loans, entertainment and fuel. It will also send you alerts telling you such things as the money you deposited is now available for use or that you’ve overshot your budget in a category. Mint automatically analyzes and graphs the performance of any investments you have included in your account, showing you how you’re doing versus relevant market indicies like the S&P 500 and highlighting the fees you’re paying in each of your accounts. They also offer an alerting system that sends you email or SMS messages (your choice) on any unusual activity, low balances, fees and upcoming bills.

They also have a proprietary algorithm that continuously searches through thousands of offers from various companies to find you the best deals on everything from bank accounts to credit cards; brokerage accounts; and more. The software identifies suggestions based on your spending patterns, thus they are are unique to you.  Another nice feature shows your total net worth by tapping into your mortgage, investment and loan information to look for updates each time you log in, so you know how much you’re worth at any given time.

Yodlee Moneycenter Free: Yodlee uses the same software behind mint, but according to several reviews offers even greater functionality. It is easy to set up and to import data from various financial accounts. In addition to banks and credit cards, it can extract datal from loans, investment accounts, even gmail and payPal. It offers a very detailed overview page where consumers can set up alerts in a variety of categories, along with a view of their Net Worth. Finally, it offers several different views of your spending habits, including spending compared to income and expenses categories. 

Buxfer.  Buxfer is less sophisticated than other personal finance management tools.  Buxfer tracks only banking and credit card accounts, but you can create very basic budgets and sign up for email alerts. A pro is that it is simple to use, and it provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions on how to set up your accounts on its website. This free tool is fine for somebody looking for just a basic financial tracking, or to track spending among members of a group of people who share expenses.

Wesabe: Wesabe offers strong financial planning tools, as well as a very active community of people looking to help each other reach their financial goals. Like Mint, you are given “tips” based on your own unique spending habits, which allow you to compare retailers that you use to other businesses that offer the same types of goods or services. If you like the social networking element that is unique to Wesabe, this may be your preference.

If you don’t know how you’re spending your money, you won’t able to bring it under control. These free tools can make this task much easier, with minimal investment as far as time and money. Additionally, each of these websites seem to have a very strong commitment to privacy and security.

Do you use personal finance management tools? What do you like best about the program you use? Share your experience by leaving a comment!

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