Combining and Tracking Couple’s Finances, More Moneydashboard tips, plus free £10!
To run a tight financial ship in any relationship you both have to be transparent in what you are spending, have similar long term financial goals, and hopefully have the same level of frugality running through your veins. There is wiggle room on this of course, but you generally have to be in the same ball park I find, or things aren’t going to go well long term! Finding a frugal partner is something I will have to leave up to your own judgement, and TEA has a great post on discussing your financial goals with your partner.
That leaves being transparent with your spending, and the easiest way of doing that is clearly by just combining your accounts into a joint account. However this can be a bit of a pain, and something that not everyone wants to do!
If the reason your significant other doesn’t want a joint account is because they specifically don’t want to reveal their spending, then some pretty loud alarm bells should be pounding in your ears! But let’s assume that this is not the case, how do we go about pulling in transactions from multiple accounts in the easiest way possible? Once again… enter MoneyDashboard.
A brief digression – Get £9.97 when you sign up through Top Cashback
This offer only lasts 2 days from Friday 13th January until Sunday 15th so you need to be quick!!! But if you open a Top Cashback account here* then, find the moneyDashboard offer (it’s currently on the homepage, or just use the search box) you will get an even bigger than normal £9.97 cashback, simply for opening and syncing at least one of your bank accounts. Which really is money for nothing (well, 15 minutes of sitting at your computer!).
How we track our multiple accounts in Money Dashboard
Back to the main topic then, which is how MD makes it so much easier to combine your multiple bank accounts into one easy to view application.
Check out the main dashboard page:
On the left there you can instantly see that we have 3 current accounts (why 3? More on this later) linked in, plus a couple of credit cards, with balances etc… for each one. Sweet right?! The pie chart type thing on the right includes the spending from all of your linked accounts for the current month. All done automatically. You can also view the last months pie chart, or select a custom date range, so it’s fully configurable!
Adding a new account is easy:
Then just choose the type of bank/card and fill in your online banking details here:
A few quick notes on security
Last time I posted about MD there seemed to be a lot of wussypants worrying over the security aspect of giving a third party your log in details. I’d advise you to read the comments on that post from Nyul and further research from myself shows that it uses underlying technology from a company called Yodlee, which have been in this game for over 10 years now. If their technology was insecure, you would have heard something about it by now! (And they’d be out of business!).
It’s also very much worth checking out their FAQ section here:
https://www.moneydashboard.com/faq
Questions in particular to read are I want to start using Money Dashboard, but I’m concerned about giving you my bank details and My bank advises not to provide internet banking credentials to any third party.
There are other arguments against doing things “in the cloud” such as the company going bust but I think that MD’s business model is really sound and they’ll be around for a long time (again, see FAQ section for more info on that).
*UPDATE* – After more comments below about the security risks of such software (not just MD, but any type really) and to keep this article as balanced and readers informed as possible I thought it was worth updating this section with a summary of the counter arguments, which ermine sums up nicely with his comment:
“The risk assessment is absolutely your call, however the fact that the threat vector is not just MD being hacked is worth adding for the sake of completeness. Logically MD’s application or code snippet/plugin on your computer (not MD itself, I acknowledge) must know your password and userid, these will presumably be stored on your computer and not MD so your computer will be doing the fetching job. But any bank worth its salt will know this is not you doing it manually. But as you say, life is risk.”
Other combined banking account features
Transactions: You can also view all your transactions in a list, and there are many ways to filter and search for individual transactions, and it updates really fast as well! You can also select specific accounts to show transactions from:
As you can see each account has a colour attributed to it so it’s really easy to what transaction has originated from which account. You can even customize your own account colours!
In/Out Graph: Finally there is an income vs expenses graph for the last year and again you can select individual accounts to show or any combination of the multiple accounts you have linked:
Other Money Dashboard tips
They’ve finally bought back the split transaction feature, which is a god send!
For example if you have paid for something for your mate, and they’ve give you back the money then obviously you don’t count the full lot as spending. Here’s how you’d deal with this situation:
- On the transactions page hover over the desired transaction you wish to split.
- You should see the split button appear on the right hand side. Click it!
- You should now see this box appear:
- If we have been to the Llama park 1 and split the lunch bill evenly for example, I would leave the two splits as half and half and register one under the “Current account transfer” tag. This tag means that it is not counted as income or spend on all of the other charts by default, which is what we want in this case
- If my friend then transfers the money they own me back to my account, I also make sure that is tagged as a current account transaction, again so it doesn’t count as income. The same if they give me the money and I pay it into my bank.
- The final scenario is if they give me cash and I blow it in the gift shop, perhaps being sucked in by the soothing sound of the Peruvian pipes or finest llama wool clothing on offer. In this case I would have to go back to step one and tag the split part of that transaction as whatever I’d spent it on (I’m not sure if MD has a “gift shop tat” category but I am sure you can find something suitable 🙂 )
Advice on the mental side of tracking things as a couple
The number one reason for arguments in couples is often said to be money, and this is no different in the TFS household. We have tried many different ways of budgeting and tracking our finances, and all have failed and tended to produce minor spats over silly amounts of money that were just not worth the energy in the first place. Plus I felt they never really gave us much incentive to actually save (although we still did, but could have done better). For example I feel budgeting is like that. I don’t really like budgeting despite writing about it long ago and much prefer tracking!
But around September last year I came up with a new idea and it’s been working well so far. Here is what we do:
Three bank accounts
- Santander – This is our joint account. All income comes into here and all monthly and joint/household expenses go out of it. (There are also 2 cashback credit cards which are for household stuff only, paid off in full every month via this joint account)
- TSB1 and TSB2 – These are two separate accounts for each of us, and we transfer £500 into each every month. We then have that as our “fun spending” where the other person is not really supposed to judge as we have different values on what our money goes on (i.e. hair, clothes, make up vs golf).
- We both then have a challenge to see how much of the £500 2 we can end up with at the end of the month with!
- This system reduces any petty arguments over small amounts because we can just focus on the bigger picture.
- However we can still sit down and chat like adults about how we’ve done each month at the end of it, because it’s all tracked in MoneyDashboard. If one of us is spending consistently far more than the other, questions are sure to be asked.
- The extra bonus of having the TSB accounts is they have 5% interest which is almost unheard of nowadays. It’s paid on balances up to £2000 so we just keep a floating balance of £2K in each to reap the full benefits. Also you have to fund the accounts with £500 every month, which is why we transfer that amount (plus it conveniently seems like a reasonable amount to end up with decent “savings” at month end)
The Spreadsheet
Finally I will then go through the MD categories and add the final numbers for each month in the month columns in the spreadsheet, to give us an idea of how we are doing in each category overall and over time. Have a look at the spreadsheet (and copy it to your own google drive to edit it), it should be fairly straightforward but if you have any questions let me know in the comments!
I linked to it in my January expenses post but here it is again in case you missed it:
What about you?
So what do you think of our system? Have you thought up or are running anything similar?
The idea is to turn saving money from a chore and a bore into a bit of a challenge and something a bit more fun.
Let us know what you think in the comments as usual!
Cheers and have a good weekend all!
Final note: I’d just like to say this post was inspired by new on the scene blogger Frugal Freelancer’s post here where she mentions that tracking their expenses will be hard due to her husband having seperate accounts. Go check out her blog, it looks like it could be a good one!
*Affiliate link. If you sign up through this link you will be giving me a small amount of £££ but more importantly a massive high five and saying “Hey TFS, I really like what you are doing here, keep it up son” and I will feel all fuzzy inside and write lots of more exciting blog posts for you to read. So everyone’s a winner!
Notes:
- Yes, this actually exists and we went there the other day! ↩
- Clearly anyone who has read our 6 month expenses report from last year will realise there wasn’t much left of the £500 in any given month at the start. However!!! We are both coming down each month so I am really thinking this system is working well for us. We’ll see how far we can push it over the coming year. ↩
Discussion (28) ¬
Thanks for the shout out! I have a friend that loves llama parks… always thought he was one of a kind, maybe it’s a bigger thing than I realised, hope you had fun!
It’s very interesting to hear how you and your wife have consolidated your finances. I think this is something that people are terrible at discussing in general and there are so many different ways to go about it. We are somewhat similar in that we have a Santander 123 as our joint account and we keep the balance at around £20k to maximise the interest and so it effectively functions as a savings account at the same time.
However – our salaries are not paid into our joint account, instead those go into our personal accounts and we transfer an agreed amount into the joint account every month. I originally preferred this because it forced me to manage my inconsistent earnings so that I would make my monthly transfer regardless of whether I had invoices paid or not.
BUT it does mean that our savings aren’t being managed in any coherent way – so far, we’ve just saved individually, watched the number build up, and then make a lump sum overpayment into the mortgage or ISA. Your way is much better in that regard! I may have to rethink matters 🙂
Hi FF – no problem!
Haha it’s random I know! We took my nephew and neice there just to frame it with with a little less weirdness. It was great fun but I got spat on by a Llama (they tend to do this!) and have since developed Llama flu (TFS Exclusive – you heard it here first) so it wasn’t without it’s downsides.
There are many ways to work with couples finances but this seems to work well for us. I never really understood why you wouldn’t want a joint account especially once you are married but many of our friends do not and they seem to make it work, so good for them I say 🙂
Only 3 current accounts??? What – no regular saver at First Direct getting 6% interest on £300/month? 😉
Not sure i was one of the wussypants, but FWIW i’m still old fashioned & pull the statements into excel & add them to our “costs of ife spreadsheets”. Mrs LCIL is self-employed so we need to pull her expenses out seperately anyway so MD probably no so useful in that regard.
Critically there are no secrets between us in how we spend our money – i’m sure this is something that makes our relationship stronger.
We sort of do the reverse of you – wages paid into current accounts & then these accounts feed our joint accounts to pay for mortgage/bills/food/investements etc. We leave a little in each our accounts each month for our own hobbies/clothes/knitting/brewing/baking/cycling kit.
I think your method is probably better but it would be too much hassle to reverse the set up with all Mrs LCIL subscriptions/costs that are linked to her current account.
Will check out First Direct… thanks for the tip off!
Are there any other requirements / max/min balances on that one? I’ll check it out anyway.
Yep no issues with the manual tracking if it works for you, I tried it and hated it – maybe it was just my first attempts at spreadsheets were terrible but either way MD or similar is so much better IMO.
Agreed on the no secrets thing which is why it would always be a red flag if someone was dead against having a joint account for me. I mean it wouldn’t be a deal breaker but I’d have to be wondering why?
Your method sounds good and I think that is probably what most people do from anecdotal evidence, maybe we are the ones that are a bit backward 🙂
Inspired to comment…I found a link to your blog around a month ago and love it (and a few of the others like Mr MM and Simple living). I have always been interested in finances and recognising the consumer traps even when I join in. We are 59 and 55, retired and enjoying life. One of my big eye openers when I finished at 55 was the remembering after those mid years of children, mortgages and divorces, how much I hated working for the man from the age of 17 and how great it is to escape. A lot of the blog resonates with my head but what got me to reply was that we do exactly the same with our money, joint a/c, £500 pocket money each into two smaller a/cs, reward credit cards for monthly household cleared each month……we have been together for 10+ years and got married in 2009. We only joined up the finances then, we both went through difficult divorces to be together and didn’t jump straight into financial unity, although have always been very open re money. We are in the middle of eight months not too strenuous backpacking and are right now finishing breakfast overlooking the bay in Taiohae, Nuku Hiva, The Marquesas, French Polynesia. Next week it’s the Cook Islands. The last big trip was a six month “career break” in 2009 and I got back to work in 2010, did one day, felt the shit being shovelled into my in-tray from the guy who had been holding the fort and the next day I resigned, I love it. If anyone’s interested in our travel budget I had a plan and keep a daily budget and contingency system.
NB I’m very suspicious of everyone’s much vaunted online security after Snowden, GCHQ revelations etc so if that makes me a wuss…..well…AIB.
Hello mhowascool 🙂
Thanks for taking the time out to comment and the kind words.
Thats actually really cool that we are running the same kind of system! Convergent evolution I think they call that? 😉
Great to hear you are living the life right now, French Polynesia… sounds bloody fantastic!
Nice story on quitting after one day back at work… that is most definitely a badass thing to do and be in the position to be able to do.
Maybe you should start your own blog detailing your travels and budgets? I know I’d be interested in that for one!
Hehe… another one in the wuss camp. Only joshing of course… ETTO (Each to their Own – If that isn’t an internet thing I think I need to coin it for this blog as have been using it a lot recently 🙂 )
Thanks for sharing how you do it, but it does make our system seem even more convoluted and ridiculous than I ever thought it was!
We’ve each got a current account, all the household bills come out of mine (Santander 123 baby!) And the mortgage comes from T’s account. He’s reluctant to change anything, or even have my earnings go into his account. This makes things awkward and annoying, and despite my best efforts, he always thinks we are not going to have enough money every month, but of course, we always do, with money to spare… Oh well.
Everyone loves the 123 ay 🙂
Hey, if your system works then it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit more complicated. If it ain’t broke, no need to fix it right!
Cheers!
Hi TFS, I really like how you’ve got things worked out even down to the both of you using Santander cash back credit cards and maximum interest current accounts all round.
We have been married for over 30 years and have always had one joint current and savings account only (until recently when we opened a Santander 123 for some of my husband’s pension LS). For a long period of time when the kids were growing up I wasn’t earning a bean so there wouldn’t have been anything to pay into a separate account even if we had considered it.
Even though we now have multiple accounts (I also have an M&S account) we treat them all as effectively “joint”. I admit that 30 years have had to rub some corners off as far as financial “discussions” go but we never argue about money now. This might be partly due to the fact that we now have (more than) enough, which wasn’t always the case in the past.
If I were to be starting afresh though, given today’s very different cultural and employment profile, I would definitely do something that allowed a little financial independence for both parties. Excellent setup.
Hiya!
Actually that is one thing I haven’t looked into properly, our cashback cards are Amex (1.25%) and Barclaycard (rubbish 0.5% used to be much better!).
I should look at the Santander one as I know you can get up to 3% on certain things on that can’t you. Need to weigh that up with another card to carry and pin number to remember though (maybe we’d ditch the barclaycard if we got that instead!)
Yea I think arguments are generally going to thin out over the years and money becomes more abundant, but only if you set yourself up for that to happen which is what everyone around here is aiming for (and some like yourself have achieved)!
Cheers 🙂
I think I was one of the Wussypants you refer to. Fair cop, don’t mind being called that (I’ve been called worse :-)). Still have the same opinion and the FAQ links you mention above don’t do much to remove the concern. Its easy to say told you so in hindsight, and I’m not the one gaining £15 everytime someone signs up on your link so have no ulterior motive for saying be careful. Doesn’t take much effort to do the old spreadsheet method. For what it is worth, I work at a well known IT Security company and these sort of services get leaks and hacks all the time – you just never hear about it (apart from the big ones).
I was one of the wussypants too. The risk isn’t just of the cloud service provider being hacked. If you have fraud on your account you bank will do its damnedest to repudiate any liability and most have a ‘don’t even think of writing your access details down, never mind tell anybody else’
They will know you are using MD. And will use it against you even if the loss isn’t connected with MD. But hey, TFS can make this risk call himself. But it isn’t as simple as representing the attack space as being just moneydashboard. It seems to be tough enough to get banks to stump up for fraud without giving them a get out of jail free card to make it all your fault.
I have used Quicken for the last 20 years to do this job, and I second everything TFS says about tracking your spending. It isn’t connected with my bank account – I reconcile all this crap by hand, ideally entering stuff as I buy it. I don’t mind spending what I do on red wine or CDs – but I do want to know what it is, so as I can decide if I do mind. I’m of the opinion that if it’s too much to bother entering then maybe I don’t want the stuff enough 🙂
@both – Haha… sorry about that comment it was perhaps a little harsh looking back at it, was meant in jest of course.
@Mr Moolah – It’s a calculated risk as ermine rightly points out, I’m not saying there is no risk but then again there is a risk with every single online thing I sign up to, and I probably have well over 200 online accounts with various services and companies I have bought stuff off of or otherwise signed up for. We are in the digital age, let yourself go and enjoy the bounties my friend! 😉
Further, I just don’t really see why you’d single out MD or any other online financial tracker over anything else you’ve done online. I can’t find an exact MMM article on this sort of thing but these two kinda sums it up for me:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/06/02/insurance-a-tax-on-people-who-are-bad-at-math/ and http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/07/safety-is-an-expensive-illusion/
I mean really what are the chances of you getting hacked because you signed up to MD/other online tracker? Is that 1 in a million chance really worth the extra bother of doing everything manually? For me it’s not.
You say it’s easy to say I told you so but then you could be in a serious car accident next time you are driving and I could have told you to stay indoors and not risk it due to hearing about car crashes – a facetious analogy perhaps but to me that is all you are saying i.e. *Deliberately make your life harder due to extremely small chance of something bad happening*. If we all lived like that we’d never leave the house or do anything worthwhile!
The fact that I *may* get £15 if someone signs up to TopCashback (not MD) is neither here nor there why I would recommend it. I have been clearly using it myself for 6 months and think it is a good and free to use product, have weighed up the miniscule risks that have been highlighted compared to the enormous benefits it brings me and decided to run with it.
You say it doesn’t take much effort to do a spreadsheet, how many accounts are you tracking that over? I/we have 5 and that becomes horrendously complicated and time consuming, I tried it already and I didn’t like it.
@ermine – MD is only a pull based service and never stores your details, so I really fail to see how the banks can say you have compromised your details and wouldn’t pay out on a fraud claim. In my experience banks are actually pretty decent with catching, fixing, and paying out on that stuff so maybe you need to change bank? I agree that they *could* well exercise that clause in their T&Cs to avoid paying out, but I doubt they would unless they could prove one thing led to the other. If they did I am sure a few letters to watchdog or the like and potential publicity stink would make them pay out. Not ideal but then if you’ve been done by fraud then you are already in shit creek anyway!
@both and others – Again apologies for the wussypants comment, didn’t mean to put anyone’s nose out of joint, just that the security concerns are valid but overblown (IMO), but I am fully supportive of everyone doing it their own way, whatever works for ya!
Cheers again for the comments and adding to the discussion and as a final point thanks for bringing to everyone’s attention about the possible risk again.
🙂
Honestly, no offence taken – I think I took it in the spirit it was meant (And having read a lot of ermine’s stuff I think he’s of the same sort). If you need MD because of the complexity of your financial set up, I would focus on reducing that complexity rather than chucking a tool at it and effectively wallpapering over the issue. Plus, blatant affiliate links (such as the one you have used here) on FI sites just knock your credibility. I’m still following, but you are on two strikes….
Hi MM… glad about that and thanks for taking the time to reply to say so.
You make good points but we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one, I think I made enough valid points of my own in the article to explain our mildly overcomplicated set up and why it works for us? In general though I agree that the simplest solution is often the best one!
Re: affiliate links, sorry if you thought it was blatant.
I would argue that I have written a 1762 word blog post which I think contains enough original and useful content to people to stand up on it’s own right. It’s not exactly a 301* word spam post is it?
I was planning on posting this article anyway as I wanted to reveal further how we plan our finances using MD, and it just so happened that they had an extra cashback offer over the weekend with TopCashback, so it gave me the nudge to get it done and highlight that offer to readers who can take advantage to it.
A few further questions for you:
1. Where do you personally draw the line? For example do you think google ads should be banned? If not then why not, because they are usually far more useless than well placed affiliate links for recommended products or services.
2. If I see a good offer for a product or service that I already use and think would benefit readers would you rather not hear about it?
3. If I use a product or service and decided to write a blog post about how it helps me in my everyday life and it happens to have an affiliate link available should I deliberately NOT use that link, just to maintain “credibility”?
4. I’d be interested to know what other PF sites you read? MMM? Covered in affiliate links – he is earning $10K a month minimum from that blog. You’d struggle to find many PF blogs with no affiliate links on it and many of them are just as blatant as the one I put in this post.
5. How many strikes do I have left? 😉
I take your point that there is a whole “Get £9.97 free cash bla bla bla” section on this blog post which is a bit over the top, but for people to get that offer they need to have it highlighted well for them! Anyone with an ounce of website or marketing knowledge will know this – If I just had it as part of the blog text then people may have missed it.
With the more obvious and highlighted links, yes, maybe that means 1 or 2 more referral fees for me but it also means 1 or 2 more of my readers earning themselves some free cashback. Everyone’s a winner in my book but if you cannot see it from that angle and think that it’s not on then again we’ll have to agree to disagree 🙁
The bottom line is that this blog is not going to turn into a Martin Lewis style “highlight every offer and affiliate link going” type of site, but if something comes along on something I already use and would readily or do already endorse, I am damn well going to highlight it on the blog and if I can earn a few pennies** on the side then I will try my best to do so.
Cheers again, and I’d welcome your further views on points raised. Maybe I should put it out there on a main post to get further views as this has become quite the discussion already?
*300 words is the generally accepted limit for google to not consider your post spam, along with a lot of other criteria of course.
**So far I have earned £7.50 from one full sign up on the TopCashback referral scheme which doesn’t even cover one years worth of hosting fees. Great huh? Really worth compromising my values over right? NO! Exactly my point in that I think people should give it a go anyway as it’s a great website (along with MD which there is no referral scheme for currently that I know of!)
First off, a mild apology – my comment reads a bit negative, however, not intentional as I think anyone who has the time & effort (Not to mention perseverance to put up with whingers like I have sounded) to spread the word of FI should be rightly applauded. I think the UK FI scene is gathering some pace, but it is a hard slog – it is almost as awkward as talking about your religious views. Where’s my blog??? Yep, I’m a complete hypocrite really.
I’m lucky enough to have made it to FI, but still work – I think I will stop sometime within the next year. I’m actually enjoying my current project so will carry on for a while longer. I have been living this way of life for about 8 years (Started building my escape fund about 10 years ago) so, I have been around the block a bit, read a lot of stuff and can talk fairly comfortably about what works and what doesn’t (at least for me anyway). So, let me answer your points……
1. Where do you personally draw the line? – I draw the line where the article crosses the point from being informative, to a sales pitch. Now in the case of your MD article, I felt that the line was crossed and sensible objections to the use of MD were met with more sales pitch type responses. Google ads tend to be benign – I doubt many true FI’ers will click them and no reference in the articles mention them or try to get you to click them – they are just there!
2. Good Offer / Product or service. Yes of course, however, be very conscious about not crossing the sales line. If you do make money out of it, be VERY clear that you are*
*Not some poxy small print asterix reference point like this
3. Should I deliberately avoid affiliate links? That’s your choice – you will run the risk of people like me making a decision as to your motives and therefore your credibility is in your hands. You have to make a decision as to what your TRUE purpose of your blog is – is it actually to make money from or is it just to be a journal of your attempt to become FI and passing on some of your findings to other likeminded individual? Why do you think the whole clean fund change to non-commission based investments happened? It was because people were selling duff investments to ignorant punters based on the commission amount they would earn rather than the suitability of the investment (Should be grandma sucking eggs around these parts!)
4. What other PF sites do I read? Used to read MMM religiously, not so much these days – only if the specific article interests me. Simple Living in Suffolk, The Escape Artist, Lacking Ambition (Has disappeared off the scene recently), Moderator, DIY Investor, UTMT, RIT are the main ones – yep, there is a spattering of ad’s there, but I have never felt pushed towards them.
5. Plenty of strikes left – there are usually 3 batsmen per inning and 9 innings in a game so that’s 25 left by my book.
I suppose you have to remember that MMM (And others) have actually done it, have actual experience and are living it day to day. This carries a lot more credibility from the outset – they aren’t just throwing out the theory or methods, they are the real deal. Based on your spending from last year, you have a way to go before being able to gain that level of credibility – don’t smash what you have built up by cheap shots trying to snatch the odd £10 from a few punters, It’s probably a false economy in the long run.
Hi MM!
First, sorry for the ridiculously delayed reply. I saw the long comment and thought I’d wait till I had time to read and reply properly.
Second, no apology needed but thanks nonetheless. I can tell from your previous comments you aren’t a whiner and are very much a valuable contributer to the UK FI scene, whether you have a blog or not. Cheers!
1. Thanks for clarifying. I don’t think I have anything I can add here apart from that our lines are in different places on these matters.
2. You’ve contradicted yourself a bit here, on one hand you are saying the aff links are blatant, yet on the other you are saying it is not clear enough they are aff links. Also the * denotation is used across many sites and very rarely would you see anything more obvious denoting an aff link. However I will consider just writing “(affiliate link)” after any such links in future just to make it even more clear to users.
3. The true purpose of the blog is to hook as many people as possible into the idea of FI or at the least living below their means . The thing is if you make a website with enough readers you will end up making money out of it one way or another in the long run. This could be via affiliate money, google adsense, or even if you deliberately avoid either of those then eventually you will end up writing a book (ERE) or get numerous job offers because of that successful website you built. So would you say, if I wanted to stay consistent with my one true purpose, if I was offered some interesting freelance work for web dev on the side, say because I mentioned it on this blog that is what I do in my day job, I would have to turn it down as well? The situation is not as black and white as that of course! Also I don’t see the issue with having more than one purpose to the blog. If I can make some money on the side by simply writing about what I would normally be writing about anyway then that is also a goal of this blog, I’d be an idiot for it not to be IMO. Also to compare people selling overpriced crap to an affiliate link for free software is a bit of a stretch!
4. Most of those sites you read are, I agree, not as “affiliate linky” as this article has been. (apart from MMM. I think he pushes certain things just as hard if not harder than I have done with MD here). I also agree it is nice to see a blog that doesn’t have affiliate links so now I guess I am the hypocrit.
However it doesn’t put me off when I do see one, as long as the other content is good. I either ignore it if what they are writing about isn’t relevant, or take a look if I think it will help me.
Another “however”, if a blog I read had written a post about Moneydashboard 12-18 months ago then I would have tracked my finances much earlier, and potentially have been in a much better position on my savings already. I would have happily swallowed a slightly salesly pitch to have that happen, and the writer of said article to get a kickback for it. It could have “saved” me £1000. I could be doing that for my readers by shouting about this software. For this reason I believe it should be shouted about. Apart from the affiliate link my post would have been exactly the same, enthusiastic and somewhat salesy, because I am enthustiatic about the software and think as many people should use it as possible, if they aren’t otherwise tracking their finances already. If I wrote a post saying, “look at Moneydashboard, I guess you can use it, you know, if you want to. It’s alright I suppose.” I cannot imagine many people would give it a try and therefore I haven’t ended up helping anyone.
5. Hah! OK that’s good to know. Thanks and hopefully I haven’t used any more up with my replies above! 🙂
I agree I have a long way to go in building any cred on the spending front but personally I don’t see how these two things are related.
Also, MMM and MadFIentist (another dude who has just made it to FI) have both been criticised recently for promoting Betterment, for “selling out” etc. So I guess having more cred will get me no favours in people calling me out for these sorts of posts anyway (in fact it will likely make it worse, more cred = bigger audience = more naysayers).
To wind things up then, I guess my overall stance is that helping people and making money can be completely aligned goals, and in fact often (most?) times one (money) follows the other (helping people). Therefore I do not see a conflict of interest in writing this blog and making a small amount of money out of it with posts such as this one.
Cheers again!
The risk assessment is absolutely your call, however the fact that the threat vector is not just MD being hacked is worth adding for the sake of completeness. Logically MD’s application or code snippet/plugin on your computer (not MD itself, I acknowledge) must know your password and userid, these will presumably be stored on your computer and not MD so your computer will be doing the fetching job. But any bank worth its salt will know this is not you doing it manually. But as you say, life is risk. And
I didn’t take any offence at all at being a wussypants 😉
I personally don’t worry about affiliate links because ad-block plus is my friend. But I am with MM in the second-order effects. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Sweat the big stuff. If affiliate links, coupons or whatnot are making a significant amount of savings for you then query the amount you are spending 😉
I had a top cashback account, cashback credit cards (total win about £150 over several years!) and some of the other cobblers MSE advocated at the start of my journey. I just didn’t buy enough Stuff to make it worth my while. I appreciate, however, that one’s spending is different at different stages of life, and having just moved perhaps you may gain greater utility from such things. If it’s enough to be interested it is a little red warning like on the general spending front. Not an urgent stop now switch engine off sort of warning but one nevertheless 😉
Hi ermine,
Fair points about the threat vector, I’ll update the section on security when I get a minute to reflect both of your comments to make it a bit more balanced!
I do agree with what you are saying about the cashback element, but on the other hand I can use my cashback credit card on food, petrol, and other necessities so to me it’s just free money. The trick is clearly to not buy stuff you wouldn’t have normally just because you gain cashback on it (same as avoiding “I got a great deal on it” mentality), which would let’s face it, be stupidity of the highest order.
Yes… if I am making £100 cashback on TC per year then at between 1-5% it probably signifies that I am overspending online!
But also, there are plenty of free cashback deals they do, which require little effort, so I think you can build up a nice little stash easily with just a “normal” spend. Overall I think it’s a great website and there is no reason not to use it, it’s not sweating the small stuff while disregarding the big picture IMO but just another small win that when added up with some of the other stuff will put me in a far better position than your average punter*, just like TEA wrote about recently: http://theescapeartist.me/2015/03/02/the-aggregation-of-marginal-gains/ – viewed from this perspective, I think it is worth my while however little the money coming in is (for practically no effort)
*Yes I know the idea is to stop being “the punter” but we all have to buy some things some of the time.
Opps – Thats “Monevator” not “Moderator” but I guess you already worked that out…
I have been using Money Dashboard for some time now. Absolutely invaluable. Your post has, however, highlighted something I had missed up to this point: the split transaction!
This had been one issue with managing my account alongside our joint account. Glad I now know this can be done. Just have to go and do it now!
Thanks for the tips!
Hi DD,
Glad someone else is finding MD useful… 😉
Yea the split transaction was a big missing feature for a few months there, but now they’ve brought it back, and it’s even easier to use than before, it’s a bloody godsend. I can’t really think of any more features I would desperately need now but you can see they are still improving it every month with new bells and whistles, I am very much impressed with the speed of development going on.
Cheers!