Earlier this month I wrote about finding a new personal finance tool, Rudder.  Rudder is mostly targeted towards day to day money management which has increased my awareness in this area.  I used to be guilty of only reconciling categories and checking spending once or twice a month but now, I do this every other day.  All thanks to Rudder.  So today I’ll be giving an update on the pros and cons now that Ive had a chance to use it for 2 weeks and get a better grasp on how it can help manage our finances.

Pros

Increases personal finance awareness

Instead of checking my accounts once or twice a month I now check them every other day.  This is because I need to check off the bills that clear our account so that it updates our balances accordingly.  Prior to using Rudder I would just wait for cerrtain things to clear and that’s when some things fell through the cracks like manual online bill payments that Im not able to make automatic.

Financial Forecasting

I like being able to look ahead 2 months and predict our cashflow.  This is especially helpful around planning temporary irregular/ongoing expenses and vacations. I can’t say enough about this option because there are quite a few bills coming out of our accounts every month.  So to have something that can concretely lay this information out for me  has been a blessing.  Since we also have multiples streams of income coming in, it’s nice to be able to plug these in as they come in and see the differences ahead of time in our account balance and plan accordingly.  I can’t plug in checks ahead of time in Mint or Yodlee so this is indeed very helpful.

Aside: Now I do have quite a few Cons in comparison to Pros but they in no way outweigh the positives.  I just look at it as the few little things the Rudder tech team needs to work on in order to make this a more robust/solid tool.

Cons

Debt Reduction Tool

Where is it?  I would so love to be able to know that after paying all of our bills, that I have X amount of dollars to throw towards X loan/credit card.  Of course I can do this myself but it’s just a thought.  I can look out 2 months and see that we’ll have some extra cash flow and it would be great if there was a pop up that said something like “if you put $500 towards X credit card you’ll have X left over and reduce your balance by X $amount.00″ Make sense?  Sometimes we need a little prompting in this area.

Spending Meter is Broken/Inconsistent

The spending meter is often broken or inconsistent.  At first glance I thought it would tell me when I went over on discretionary spending but Im not sure how it allocates how much I have to spend in this area.  Does soneone out there on the Rudder team know how this works?  I see great potential in a tool like this, especially as they grow and add more features to suppot this particular widget.  They just need to hire me already!   LOL  I’ll tell you what we need and how to make it work!

Must Update Account Balance Each Pay Period

I have more irregular income than my husband does as his paychecks are deposited like clockwork.  Since I receive checks in the mail. my income is pretty much when I go to the bank which can be once a month because I hate making multiple trips.  Ok but when I do enter the checks, and when my husband gets paid I often have to log in to update their system so that the starting balance is now updated with the new balance due to the recent deposits.  So it doesnt technically count the income and Im not sure how it will in the future if it needs to be updated consistently in this manner?  Im over having to do this as I do it at least once aa week because it doesnt seem like Rudder updates the BALANCES automatically but it updates recent transactions and bill activity.  So I’d like to see this improved.

Overall I still love Rudder, Im just finding out that they have a few kinks to work out as they work on and roll out new features, which I hope will be soon.  I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us.