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What’s hot in the Web 2.0 realm seems to change monthly, but for the last month or so personal finance has been it.

Mint won the Techcrunch 40 and Best of Show at 2007 Financial Innovations conference. Wesabe won ‘Best of the Web’ from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine. Yodlee has been around since 1999 and are the senior citizens of the group. Geezeo seems to be making waves by being the first of the group to add investment management to their arsenal.

All these apps are cool (I’ve only played with Mint and Wesabe). They have slick interfaces, do stuff for you like finding cost savings opportunities. It’s great timing because I have really been getting into the personal finance area in an effort to become somewhat frugal and manage my money better - which until a month ago I was very, very poor at doing. So naturally I’ve been shopping around for something to help my simple budget spreadsheetout.

I have thought of the security issues (hackers, selling data, etc) of financial data being housed with a web vendor but not along the lines as Trent at The Simple Dollar. He makes a great point…

…I haven’t yet reviewed any of them in detail, nor do I plan to.

Why not? All of these systems have one key issue that concerns me: personal security. I’m not talking about whether your data is safe from hackers. What concerns me is trusting my key personal finance information to a Silicon Valley startup company. Almost all of these products come from relatively small, non-public startups that are currently running on venture capital money.

To me, this is a giant red flag waving around in the sky. I watched an awful lot of dot-coms blow up in 2001 and their data went away to … who knows where. Where will the data go if these companies go under? Will the owners dispose of that data ethically? Will they sell it? Most of them have privacy disclaimers, but a legal document doesn’t really help if your bank login information and your credit card data is floating around on a laptop in Armenia.

Excellent point. Maybe I will just stick to MS Money for a bit - or keep my spreadsheet - or write my own app. Any suggestions?

Tags: Wesabe, Yodlee, Mint, Geezeo

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