As a youngish guy with no significant assets financial management or planning has never been something I've invested in mentally. Increasingly though lack of visibility around where my money is coming from and going is becoming pretty frustrating.
What strategies have smart people adopted to accomplish some of the following:
* Monitor, graph and predict money I/O.
* Identify major cost areas.
* Track and improve credit ratings.
* Quantify potential for lending.
I bank with HSBC in the UK, but I have no problem changing that. Having just had to resort to Javascript[0] to get a CSV output of my previous transactions this seems appealing. Is anyone doing modern UX design in online banking? Or are their other services out there to fill the gap?
[0] https://gist.github.com/cantlin/5798166
I evaluated several a while back, but found them all to be lacking, especially with respect to accurate cashflow[1] and budgeting[2]. I also wasn't very keen for a company to have access to my financial data. I now have a homemade app that uses the XML file to get the info I want out of the transactions and display it how I want.
[1] Cashflow was generally not fine-grained enough for me, my account would show as being fine over the month but there would in reality be days where it would be overdrawn.
[2] Budgeting was very naive. Budget £200 for groceries, it would budget you £200/days_in_month every day. Not very useful if you do a weekly shop.