Take control of your spending

I was catching up with the posts on Radar the other day and came across an interesting post from one of the guys at Wesabe.

You can now upload your bank statement lines from any bank in the world straight into Wesabe using a nifty new firefox extension.

I thought I'd give this a try on the flat expense account - sure enough 3 minutes later I had Wesabe programmed (via the Firefox extension) to automatically login to my internet banking (BNZ) every 6 hours and fetch any new transaction. I was really impressed as I was typing in Bank of New Zealand it just appeared on the list as I set it up. Logging in to my internet banking site took less that a minute to browse to the right account and select a Quicken file to export to, Wesabe then captured the downloaded file. I tagged a fortnights worth of income from the flatties and me and then tagged our expenses for the month. Wesabe now tells us at an instant what we are spending on Power, Gas, and Telstra (Internet,Phone,Sky). It bloody rocks!

I'll hook up my personal account as well to see where my money goes - things that instantly come to mind are how much do I spend on lunch a month and where? How much do I spend on petrol? How much do I spend at the pub? With Wesabe now keeping an eye on my spending I'll now know without having to keep a (slow) google spreadsheet up to date.

I'd recommend anyone to do this ...it is dead easy to setup. Lets compare our results in a month or so at the pub we spend too much at!