Farewell, sweet Wesabe
I just read on the blog of Wesabe, the free online financial management software I use, that they are closing down at the end of the month.
Boo-urns! I’ve really liked using wesabe! It’s helped me create a budget and to keep track of my spending and saving.
And now I’ve only got a month to figure out how I’m going to track my finances. I checked out wesabe’s competitor, Mint.com, but their system doesn’t work with Canadian accounts ((they claim they are working on getting it set up for Canada, but I’m not going to hold my breath)), and from reading the forums there, there isn’t currently any online system that works with non-US accounts. Apparently wesabe is going to release their website & infrastructure as open source so you can run it on your own computer, but it sounds like you have to know quite a bit more about computers than I do to get it set up. So, I may be harassing one of my more tech-savvy friends to set it up for me, but I figure I should have a back up plan in case it doesn’t work or in case they don’t get it released by the end of July.
Possibilities I can think of at the moment:
- buy MS Money or Quicken
- use Excel (though that seems like a lot of extra work)
- give up and go on a crazy spending spree, wasting all my money on candy and shoes!
Anyone have any other suggestions?
Comments |7|
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That sucks! I read the comments about releasing it as open source. As someone who’s been mucking about with installing open source software since the beginning of this year, it’s not as intimidating as it sounds. However, it’s a good idea to a) back up everything on your computer you want to save, and b) have someone who’s tech-savvy around just in case.
Alternately, I can send you the template for the Excel spreadsheet I’m using to track my finances 🙂
Wow… that’s super-disappointing. I was thinking of maybe going that route because I feel like I need to get off Quicken for Windows simply because my computer is a Mac and rebooting into Windows is annoying.
That being said, Quicken has always served me well. Of course, I still use Quicken 2002, which is old enough that it’s not the subscription Quicken they switched to where you have to pay them every year. I think ideally I’d want a Mac-native application but one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Quicken for Windows is that they have a Canadian version on Windows and they don’t on Mac. *sigh*
As the person who is the most likely candidate for you to turn to for tech help, my concern would be setting up a secure server config (https) which I assume you would want if you’re transmitting financial info over teh intarwebs. I’ve never had to deal with secure sockets/connections/etc. so my concern would be that would be the trickiest part. Of course, I could be wrong and maybe Hawk Host makes it easy. But it’s not something we’d want to screw up on.
@Rebecca – I’m really not wanting to go the spreadsheet route. After years of downloading my transactions which were mostly auto-tagged, the thought of having to enter and categorized them by hand makes me want to harakari myself.
@Kalev – Given that you live on the other side of the country, I wasn’t thinking of you as a likely candidate for the tech-savy person I’d be harassing for this. And it was my understanding that the wasebe open source thingamabob was going to just store everything on my own computer, rather than having it on the Internet – their posting about it says “private copy running on your own computer.” So all that security stuff wouldn’t be necessary. I really just need to get someone who knows Ruby on Rails (*cough* Clayton *cough*) to get it set up on my computer.
Oh okay, yeah it would be much better to just run it on your computer. I’m sure Clayton or someone there can help you with Ruby on Rails–it’s not super-hard stuff from what I know of it.
I was going to suggest a Numbers template but I see that you are not into that. I am impressed that I have heard of Ruby but what is Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails is some sort of computer programming thingy that I don’t understand, even after reading the Wikipedia page on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails)
I vote for give up and go on a crazy spending spree! I’ve never used Ruby or Ruby on Rails, but their whole philosophy is that programming should be simple and easy, so I can’t imagine installing a framework to work with it would be very difficult, but there’s always room for irony!