PFSN (Personal Finance Social Networks): A Hot New Trend in Personal Finance

PFSN, Nothing to check yourself for. Just a little abbreviation I made up for a possible new personal finance trend prediced to pop up. Saw a recent article on PFSNs (Personal Finance Social Networks) on Google news recently. The article from the Intl Herald Tribune talks about how online social networking is meeting personal finance. If the experts are right, then there could be 2 million of these savvy personal finance social network users by the end of 2008.

The author mentions 2 sites in particular geezeo.com and wesabe.com. It's an interesting concept that I look forward to learning more about over the coming months. It's like an online version of Microsoft Money (or Quicken) meets Facebook (or Weight Watchers). Jason Knight, chief executive of wesabe.com says:

"Social finance is a way for consumers to find out if there's real value where they're spending money."

The sites allow you to link to all of your online bank and credit card accounts. It can pool all this information and perform some data correlation and categorization based on what other users input already. This allows the sites to offer category suggestions and tips based on your specific expenses and entries in your financial data.

An online version of Money is a great idea, once people get past the privacy and security issues. Combine that with the encouraging support aspect of networking and sharing questions and advice with like minded members of your community could be a winner.

Etan Horowitz of The Orlando Sentinel wrote an article sharing his experience testing out three of these sites wesabe.com, expensr.com, and buxfer.com: Online Finance Help. He was impressed with the capabilities of the sites. He was especially impressed with wesabe.com:

"The best of the bunch is wesabe.com, which uses your spending history and favorite merchants to generate money-saving tips from other users or "Wesabeans" who have similar habits. If you spend your money on groceries or magazines, you'll see tips about saving money on these items. One user filled me in about $5 movies at AMC theaters before noon on weekends and holidays. "