Financial Web Application

With the slew of personal financial applications (and more) available today, one may wonder why I would find need to create yet another one. The answer is simple: they all do good number-crunching and are well-designed, but none meets the standard for what I consider a good family- and faith-oriented financial management application. In fact, most have a lot of features, most of which are not used by average people. Most of all, most are paid services: simple financial management should be free. I reviewed most of the ones on the market and set out to write my own, which I call Geldzin (German for "good wealth habits", approximately). I hope the result to be a best practices study of currently available financial management principles.

The application will do the usual financial tracking of accounts, categories, and transactions, etc. It will emphasize budget-based financial management (an example of a budget in the image below) as a lifestyle. People that follow financial advisors like Dave Ramsey might find this application extremely useful when it is complete. Newly married couples will definitely find it useful (as we have).

However, I'd like to take it further and have the application do much more as regards family finances. I want an organic place to track everything that requires money, and to always know what's available for whatever, or to just make future plans and let the application integrate them easily in budgets, savings goals, and forecasting. The vision for this application is to be a financial tool that acts more as an advisor based on the information it knows about your family. For example, having setup a budget and added your debt accounts, the application can tell you how to distribute your next paycheck to cover the financial obligations it knows about.

Further, I want to emphasize charitable giving -- everything from suggestions of good Christian charities and non-profits, to distributing whatever you may have saved for this purpose amongst your choices, to tracking which ones are tax-deductable come tax filing day.  It encourages charitable giving by allowing you to specify a percentage of income to allocate for charity/giving, and a monthly goal. The application can also advise you about planning for emergencies and facilitate saving for them.  The days of keeping a credit card around are over: you need real money set aside for emergencies.

The application also tries to minimize month-to-month fluctuations of living paycheck-to-paycheck by ensuring that you allocate enough funds for the current and the next month. Future versions will also help you save money by crawling the web to find relevant deals, based on your savings goals and transaction information. For example, if the application notices that you shop at King Soopers a lot, it would try to find coupons from that store and suggest them to you, or notify you of sales. Or if you are saving for a guitar, it would be able to tell you about current prices and availability on the web depending on how much you have saved so far.

The application will also feature anonymous comparative studies, indepth reporting, some financial calculators, popular financial blogs/articles, investment tracking and advice, retirement and life insurance planning. But rather than have static information in your account, the goal is to animate it and make it more useful for day-to-day decision making. Managing money should be a personal experience, not an abstract number scheme you must contend with.

The application is specifically designed to be very simple. As such, it will not connect to financial institutions and bill paying services or do a lot of tax accounting. It is meant to be a quick reference about you financial standing based on the activity you do in the application.