It got me to thinking about some great end-to-end “services” that I use to manage my finances and yet what’s still missing.

Bill Management

I hate getting bills in the mail and my wife hates how they clutter up our house. So when we were first married I didn’t want to look at the bills and she’d stuff them away out of site–not a good combo for our FICO score.

Then I discovered Paytrust which goes far beyond the other bill payment services available in that they actually receive your bills. When you sign up Paytrust, they give you a personal PO Box in Sioux Falls which you use as your mailing address meaning for example my PG&E (power & gas) bill gets mails to them and not my home. They scan, OCR, and post the bill online as a PDF with all the appropriate metadata (amount due, due date, etc). Bill payment is easy either by EFT or by having Paytrust mail a check on your behalf (meaning I can even pay my gardener and dentist).

There are several benefits to having Paytrust handle your bills this way:

• It’s safer as you don’t have to worry about someone stealing bills out of your mailbox (and you don’t have to worry about organizing and storing them).
• It’s a great papertrail. I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve won with Customer Service agents over the years since I know exactly when I paid each bill and for how much.
• They mail you a DVD at the end of each year with all your bills PDF’d for your tax records.
• Whether I’m at work or at home or my wife wants to view the bills–we can do it from anywhere.

You can tell that this service was thought thru E2E from bill receipt, to payment, to auditing later–which sets it apart from the competition. The only drawbacks is that the service costs $12.95/mth (vs. many banks offer pure payment services for free) and Intuit (who bought Paytrust about 5 years ago) hasn’t made any major improvements in a few years–but at least they haven’t messed it up.

Daily Account Monitoring

As a big Scott Cook fan, I always wanted to love Quicken over the years but just never did. It always felt like work to keep it’s register in sync with all my accounts and payments. It also didn’t help me during the week when I wanted to know just how much money I had at any given moment and what was coming in and going out.

Then a few years ago a board member for Mint visited a class of mine at Berkeley as a guest speaker. I tried the service out the next day and have really been pleased with it ever since. Since it’s a web service, it’s always up-to-date, synced with my accounts and I can access it from anywhere. It alerts you if you have any irregular behavior such as large deposits or withdrawls. It leverages crowd sourcing to learn how to better categorize transactions. However my favorite feature is how it learns over time what you usually spent in a given category and establishes a “budget” for that amount (letting you know if you’re over or under it later).

Finally the Mint iPhone App connects me to this rich set of data on a daily basis in a simple way. Of course it could be improved such as I’d like to be able to dig into changes in my 401K (chart of how it’s trending, which holdings are up/down), be able to re-categorize transactions, and “predict” my cash flow out a couple months based on past data and budgets.

Quarterly Lookbacks

I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad around 2001 and quickly understood the value of regularly assessing our income/expenses and balance sheet. Yet nothing at the time met my needs (Quicken, MS Money, etc) so I looked to Excel to do the work for me in the way that I found most intuitive. It puts all of our monthly income and expenses, assets and liabilities onto one sheet of paper. Simple, visual, straightforward. We update it every 3 months and graph our progress over time.

Download Financial Statement Template
[MS Excel XLS - 194KB]

I imagine that perhaps someday, Mint could replace this manual aspect of my E2E experience but just not yet–however it does make filling out the statement way easier.

In summary I have incredible brand loyalty to both Paytrust and Mint due to their well thought out service design (I’m a NPS promoter) and see how powerful a differentiator it can be in what is a crowded field.

What services do you find most useful and why?

Update 9/14: With Intuit acquiring Mint they now own two of the services I mentioned above. I hope they do a better job continuing development of Mint than they have done with Paytrust and would love an integration of the two services. If anyone on those teams would like to chat I’ve got a number of ideas…

I wanted to take this chance to thank my lovely wife Jeanine who supported me thru this whole process. Her dedication, encouragement, and devotion really helped me remained focused on my goal.

• Heating (e.g. microwaving a bottle)
• Repeated Washing (e.g. daily washing of bottles)
• Exposure to Acidic or Basic foods/liquids (e.g. Gerber Baby Food)

My wife and I took steps to investigate this further and then evaluated all products that our baby is exposed to. Below is what we learned. You can decide for yourself if you want to believe this new evidence and take action. We decided to play it safe and switch a number of the products we use with our baby.Steps you can take:

• Look for plastics labeled #1, #2, or #5 in the recycling triangle. Avoid #3 and #7. (e.g. avoid crystal clear bottles/cups by Avent & Dr. Brown and baby food in #7 plastic)
• Look for “PVC-free” on the labels of soft plastic toys and teethers.
• Choose metal feeding utensils and enamel or ceramic plates.
• Use glass to heat food or liquid in the microwave. You should not heat food in plastic containers or on plastic dishware, or heat liquids in plastic baby bottles.

Safer Products:

• Glass Baby Bottles (Evenflo 8oz from Radiant Life, BornFree 5oz)
• Drop-ins Bottles (okay since the water is heated safely and plastic is used only once)
• Fogged Plastic Sippy Cups (e.g. Avent Magic Trainer, BornFree Trainer Cups)

What about my Nalgene bottle?You’ll want to avoid polycarbonate (PC) bottles with #7 plastic. Fortunately Nalgene also makes a polyethylene (also known as HDPE) water bottle which is safer. It is a more opaque milky plastic identified by the #2 recycling symbol. Want to learn more?

• Toxic Baby Bottles Study [5MB PDF - Feb 2007]
• SF Chronicle: Replace Bisphenal A or a child’s health? [Jan 2007]
• Yahoo! Answers: Are my bottles going to give my baby cancer? [Mar 2007]
• Smart Plastics Guide [PDF - Oct 2005]
• US Department of Health and Human Services Report on Bisphenal A [Sept 2008]
• Bisphenol A Free Portal
• Old friend and fellow concerned parent, Omar Shahine on the subject with suggested product replacement ideas [Sept 2006]

My friend Kim Evans recently co-founded a company that produces a postnatal workout DVD for mom and baby. It’s called Fit + Giggles and is the perfect way to get fit and bond with your baby. Great work also to her husband Cary on the website.

I’m so happy for Kim on her new venture, what a great idea!

My little one yawning…

I’ll use this space to comment on the search industry, design trends and their impact upon the future of eCommerce.

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