Yodlee

It has been almost 6 months since I started blogging actively….of which the first four months were spent on Blogger and next two on this new domain. Just thought of highlighting some old stuff from my Blogger times which my new readers may or may not have glossed over. Here are some posts that struck the right (sometimes the wrong) chord with many people. Generally arranged in the order of oldest to newest.

How I Killed My Debt and What I Learned From it

Really Bad Debts: How About 1303.57 % APR ? Any Takers?

How Long Till You Double Your Money? Is the Rule Of 72 Good Enough?

How Much Do You Spend On Killing Cockroaches?

How Secure Is Your Information On Yodlee?

How And How Much You Would Earn From A 0% APR Offer: Part 1

How And How Much You Would Earn From A 0% APR Offer: Part 2

Do Worry About Retirement But Beware Of Overkill !

Wow ! Get A Free Xbox 360 ! …But Wait…What’s This Behind The Curtain?

18 Credit Cards And Not A Single Late Payment: A Guide To Efficient Credit Card Management #1

18 Credit Cards And Not A Single Late Payment: A Guide To Efficient Credit Card Management #2

So How Many Cards Does It Take To Hurt Your Credit Score?

And Let There Be More Light For Less Money: Save Money On Light Bulbs

Man that sort of turned out to be a mini carnival in itself :). Have fun reading those. Also let me know if you spot any errors or missing pictures. When I moved to this domain, I “imported” the old stuff from blogger…and a lot of unhappy stuff happened. So keep me posted about it.

Here is a quick tip on better credit card management. It is especially for those of us who have experienced the “Oh s**t, I totally forgot about the credit card bill” syndrome. From my perspective, the main reason for this “I forgot” syndrome is having credit cards with due dates spread all over the month. Even if you remember a few dates, there is a very high probability that you mistakenly interchange the due dates for two cards and end up paying one of them early and the other late.

One elegant way out of this is to try and get all your statements at the same time every month - let’s call this the “due-day”. Once you do this, whenever you get any credit card bill, you know that it is due only on the due-day. An obvious advantage is that remembering one date is easier than remembering a dozen (duh!). The other advantage is that you will save a ton of time setting up payments every month. When you have just one due-day, you can set up a single “payment-day” on which you can pay all the cards at once. This helps whether you are still writing paper checks or using a financial management software like Yodlee. Also, since the due-day is a day of your choice, you can choose it in a way that ensures that there are sufficient funds in your checking account for all the payments. This will minimize the risk returned checks and over-limit or “non-sufficient fund” fees.

For example, the image alongside is a screenshot of a part of my financial calendar at Yodlee showing some of my bills due in December. Notice that most cards have due dates on or around the 15th. A couple of them are way off, but I am currently working on getting those dates changed too.

The easier ones to change are Citibank, Chase and Discover..you can do them online without the need to call anyone. For American Express, MBNA/Bank of America and Sears you will need to call them to see if they do it for you.

Some important points to remember:

-Citibank allows a change in due date only once every year. So choose your dates carefully.

-Discover will not allow you to change a due date to within plus/minus 5 days of your current due date. In other words, your choosen date has to more than 5 days away from the current due date.

-Usually, the change will take at least one statement period to take effect.

-Watch out for the statement that comes immediately after changing your due dates; there might be some abnormal date adjustment in this one.

Why did I write on this specifically?

Let’s think about it for a while. The minimum monthly payments are usually only about 2% of the balance on your card. If the average American owes $8000 on credit cards, then the corresponding minimum monthly payment to avoid late fees is just $160. With this kind of a minimum due, I have a feeling that most people who are late on credit card payments, are late because of poor management (”I forgot” syndrome) than the inability to pay the minimum required. Making just minimum payments is never enough..but at least it can save you from those late payment fees and from the disatrous effect that late payments can have on your credit score.

Some more related stuff that might interest you

In a couple of earlier posts, I talked about credit card management at length. These posts generated a lot of interest, criticism, and comments. I am listing them here for your reference:

-18 Credit Cards And Not A Single Late Payment: A Guide To Efficient Credit Card Management #1

-18 Credit Cards And Not A Single Late Payment: A Guide To Efficient Credit Card Management #2

While reading them, don’t get sidetracked by issues like “Why do I have so many credit cards”. The point of these articles is to suggest ways to manage your credit cards (or other debt accounts) efficiently. As for why I have so many credit cards..there are a dozen reasons like… I needed more credit, I was stupid at times, early cards I got were not so great, got rewards points on the new cards, made half a dozen 0% APR balance transfers and so on.

Since some people were worried about my credit score after these articles, I had to write this follow-up post:

So How Many Cards Does It Take To Hurt Your Credit Score?

A quick introduction to those who are new to this blog. In part #1 of the series “18 Credit Cards And Not A Single Late Payment: A Guide To Efficient Credit Card Management #1“, I wrote on how to streamline your credit card accounts for better management. The inherent assumption in part #1 was that you do not use account aggregation services like Yodlee, MS Money, and Quicken.

In this part I will write about how Yodlee can help you to keep track of all your credit card transactions, balances, and bills. I have been using Yodlee for some months now, and managing 18 credit cards has become a cake-walk for me since then.

In the following, I will use some screen shots to make that point (click on the screen shots to enlarge them). Some time in the future, I will compare services offered by Yodlee with those offered by MS Money and Quicken, but right now, let me just stick to Yodlee for three simple reasons: Yodlee is free, it does not require any software installation, and it provides excellent customer service through Yodlee Forum! Also, I will try and restrict myself to things concerned with credit card management, although there is a lot more you can get out of it.

Basics:
Here, we are concerned only with the MoneyCenter module for our personal finance purposes (there are other things Yodlee offers, but they are not relevant here). Register for Yodlee to start using the service. Read this article to find out how to register for Yodlee. To begin using Yodlee for your credit cards, you register your credit cards and the corresponding websites’ login/password information on Yodlee MoneyCenter. This should be really easy and you should be ready to use the service within a few minutes.

Credit Card Management Made Really Easy:
Here is a snapshot of what you will see after you login and have your credit cards registered:

The “dashboard” you see in this screen shot is my favorite place to be everyday. The smudge marks are to protect my identity so that I can be “Golbguru” forever. [notice the error for the Bank of America credit card...those BoA guys really messed up most online activity after the merger with MBNA]
You can configure the dashboard to view all your credit card accounts at once. It shows you the balance on each credit card and the total amount on all cards. You can also have it display all the credit card transactions that you have done in the past few weeks. It’s a very handy way to stay on top of the credit card usage situation. It also allows you to track all your rewards (Citi Thankyou points, Upromise cash back..etc.)
Yodlee remembers credit cards’ login/password information by default. This feature enables something called as “auto-login”. When you click on auto-login, Yodlee sends your login information across and you automatically login to the credit card’s website. This means you don’t have to remember all those unique passwords and usernames :).

Use Spending Reports To Master Your Credit Card Expenses:
In the above screen shot, there is a link named “Spending Reports”. If you use that feature, you will be able to see how much you have been spending on certain items. A typical MoneyCenter spending report looks like this:

Use this to single out your “expensive” items and try to spend less on them (I know spending less is the difficult part here…) but the report can make you feel guilty about certain items very soon :); that may teach you to be more discreet in future.
You can also track your credit card usage in terms you how close you are to your credit limits and set and track budget goals, both very valuable features. This screen shot shows other options available in the “Spending Reports” module:

Streamline Using the Yodlee Financial Calendar:
In this feature you can see all your bills on a calendar and figure out when you need to start moving your money in order to pay those bills on time. In my opinion it gives a better perspective to the time-factor in managing your credit cards.

Pay All Your Bills Online:
Use the “Bill Pay” feature to pay all your credit card bills. This thing is a lot simpler than logging on to every credit card website and putting your bank’s checking account information on each of them for online payments. Here you just do it once, and you are ready to pay online! Here is a screen shot of all the “Bill Pay” features available:

The Best Part: Fraud Alerts and Bill Reminders:
You can set up your own alert-limits, suspected fraud notification limits on all cards that you register on Yodlee. For example, if you set a fraud alert limit of $200, anytime your card is charged for $200 or more, Yodlee will send you an email alerting about the charge. This is simply priceless….especially to those who are prone to identity theft. You can set up alerts to make Yodlee notify you if you are approaching your credit limit, or when a new bill is ready to be viewed, and whether a payment is due…and some more. Typical alerts look like this:

Yodlee’s Security:
Many people have concerns about how securely Yodlee handles all the personal information. For more information on this, read this post I wrote sometime back: How Secure Is Your Information On Yodlee?

Once you start using Yodlee…you are really going to get hooked on it…and then you will understand why I could write so much about it :). I have mentioned it before..I am addicted to this Yodlee stuff !

I received this comment on one of my Yodlee posts : “How do you start using Moneycenter? “. So this post is for those who have trouble finding the registration page for Yodlee. Here are the steps:

1. Go to Yodlee.com
2. On the bottom of the page you will see: Click on the “..the new Yodlee services” link.
3. Next, click on the “Log me in to US $ Yodlee MoneyCenter..” link which looks like this:
4. Once you do that you will see this above the id/password fields:Here, click on “Registration” and you will be able to register.

For convenience, here is a direct link to Yodlee Registration.

When I tell people about how great Yodlee’s MoneyCenter is, the first concern they express is “Did you say it saves all your passwords? Doesn’t that sound risky?”. I then try to alleviate their fears by mentioning a word on Yodlee’s security measures. Also, mentiong Yodlee’s customer base has helped in the past. This post summarizes some of Yodlee’s security measures. I am hoping this will encourage more people to get their financial management in order through Yodlee. This is NOT pay-per-post, just in case it sounds like an advertisement.

Here, I will quote an Yodlee employee’s response to a query on it’s security (with minor typographical edits). This and more useful information can be obtained from Yodlee Forum.

1. We encrypt everything between your browser and our servers using industry standard 128bit SSL encryption.
2. After it gets to our side, it is protected by multiple layers of firewalls - the number of which I cannot tell you for security reasons, nor the vendors, but we use many and many vendors.
3. All sensitive field data is encrypted and stored in our databases encrypted internal to the tables with multiple rotating keys.
4. All databases are protected from employee access both physically and logically.
5. All databases are encrypted physically, and all drives and tapes are encrypted with different keys.
6. No employee can put any content on any unsecure machine (i.e., nothing can be taken from the database and put on a
   laptop).
7. All servers are customized and utilize an ultra locked down version of linux.
8. Multiple layers of intrusion detection systems both software and people running 24×7.
9. Automated software auditing of our source code to check for problems in the code.

From a process point of view we’re constantly audited by all of our customers to ensure that we have the utmost security policies and practices, including:

1. Background checks for all employees.
2. Auditing of all servers.
3. Continuous security training.
4. Dedicated security office with the authority to shutdown any system to investigate a breach.
5. Systematic engagement of ethical hackers to attempt to break into our systems.

In another response from Niall Browne, Yodlee’s Director of Information Security:

Yodlee goes through in depth audits and examinations on an ongoing basis from:

• Our clients as per the list above.
• Leading security consultants including KPMG, Deloitte, Verisign Consultants, amongst others.
• Federal Examiners including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as well as the Federal Reserve.

The client list that he mentions above can be found here.

Information about Yodlee security on their website can be found here.

Tags: Yodlee, Security, MoneyCenter

Ever since I signed up for Yodlee, I have been logging in to MoneyCenter at least once a day, sometimes twice a day and on occasions more than that. It has almost become like an addiction and every time I have access to internet, I feel a compulsive urge to login to Yodlee and check the status of my accounts on the cool dashboard. The Yodlee urge is much more compelling than my other urges… like checking out the consumer electronics stuff at Best Buy or Circuit City, checking out hardware supplies at Lowes and other unmentionable urges.

Is anyone in the same boat? Do let me know about your feelings for Yodlee.

For those who are not yet familiar to Yodlee, it is an account aggregation service. Many banks offer aggregation services in partnership with Yodlee, for example: My Portfolio offered by Bank of America, EasyView by HSBC, MyCompass by Compass Bank etc.

Yodlee also offers a free version of it’s service through the MoneyCenter suite. Through MoneyCenter, you can view all your financial transactions including credit cards, mortgage payments, investment accounts, rewards accounts at-a-glance. It is similar to Quicken or MS Money, except that it is always online (in case your computer crashes, you are still covered). The fraud alerts and bill payment reminders for individual accounts are the best parts of it all. For more information on Yodlee check out the Yodlee Forum.

Once you sign up for it, you are going to love it.

Updated:
How To Register For Yodlee MoneyCenter?
How Secure Is Your Information On Yodlee?

Saw this when I logged in to Yodlee today.

UK Pound was expected, but Indian Rupee was a surprise.
Great going Yodlee.

Golbguru is now a proud Yodlee user. I will have more to write about this in days to come, as I unravel the features of this account aggregation service. Right now, its not very popular, but it does have the potential to become the next big thing on the online financial services scenario. More about Yodlee soon.

Check out my other posts on Yodlee:

How secure is your information on Yodlee?

Anyone else addicted to Yodlee?

Yodlee goes international