Category Archives: personal finance

While looking for a good way to depress myself and my coworkers I came across Salary.com’s Salary Timer.  You put in your annual salary and it breaks it down to an hourly rate and then it starts counting up a real time salary.  So, if you want to see how much of the company’s money gets used up while you try to decide where to go to lunch, you can just start the timer and you’ll know!  You’ll notice down at the bottom you can pick a celebrity to compare yourself against.  Make sure to check out the “burg-o-meter” to be truly dumbstruck.  It’s hard to imagine earning 6 figures an hour so you can use the burg-o-meter to get a real time comparison in Big Macs or SUVs instead of dollars.  I did a quick calculation and it looks like it assumes a 40 hour work week, which I’m sure is not even close the amount that a star like Oprah has to put in in a week.

Congratulations to everyone over at Wesabe, they are really blasting off over there! This article in the New York Times is just the latest in a series of good news for the social personal money mangement site including their recent $4 million in funding, coverage in the Wall Street Journal, and a Best of the Best award from Online Banking Report.  Here’s a more complete list of people singing their praises.  There’s more to come as well.  So why aren’t you using Wesabe?  Don’t you like money?

Slightly off topic here… I need something other than ‘social personal money management site’ to call it.  Can I coin SPeMMS?  We’ll just make sure to leave that ‘r’ out of it. 

 …hehe looks like I figured out how trackbacks work, sorry for the “double” posting wesabe blog readers!

Wesabe is one of a new breed of online personal finance tools that uses community knowledge to aid you in your personal financial decisions.  It also follows the first of the two main rules for Web 2.0 startups, it has a catchy but silly name.  Even though they’ve secured 4 million in Series A funding I do worry about their success since they aren’t following the second Web 2.0 rule of plastering “beta” all over the place.

To get the most out of Wesabe you need to upload your financial data to them, most banks and credit card companies provide you with a way to download your data, but it’s usually a mess, they really need to start using a data management service like the one provided at https://blog.couchbase.com/deploy-node-js-couchbase-web-application-docker-containers/.  Wesabe cleans up the data if it can and it learns from you when you clean up your own data for the items it can’t.  Now if the idea of uploading your financial data to someone else’s website doesn’t strike you as immediately ridiculous you need to STEP AWAY FROM THE INTERNET NOW.  It was Wesabe’s data bill of rights that convinced me to join.  Making your data readable is just the first step the next step is…

(more…)