An overview of financial lifestream tools thus far

October 18 2009, 4:23pm

My friend Natalie posted a comment on my last post, which recapped my meeting with my professor last Monday.

I want to address her questions about the tools I’m using to sort out my finances. She asks specifically about Mint and widgets, and so I want to explain how using third party services (like Mint) and live data from widgets (which don’t really exist for financial services yet) can be brought together in a single lifestream system. I’ll explain why I’m tracking my finances with a lifestream in the first place. Lifestreaming is the digitization of your life. Essentially, it is an archive of all your digitized, documented activity (online and off). The simplest version of a lifestream is a collection of RSS feeds from the sites you post to. Your lifestream can be feeds from your Twitter, Flickr, and blog. Or it can include your Pandora stations, exercise record, and Netflix queue. Or it can be all of the above. The important thing about lifestreaming is that you are consciously posting information about yourself to represent yourself online. Eventually, a lifestream will be the entire digitized record of everything in your life. That’s a lot of data. What’s the point? Last year, much of my work was about figuring out why one would want to ‘lifestream’. And I found that consciously publishing content to my lifestream made me more accountable for my actions, it backed up my photos, text, and videos, it documented my work process and mistakes, and it started a ton of helpful conversations. It allowed me to step back from my life and view it in terms of data. I could begin to objectively see patterns in my behavior. As Andrew Donoho has said “If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it.” And so this year I wanted to apply lifestreaming to something specific. I keep thinking how lifestreaming has helped my life so much, but I couldn’t give a whole lot of concrete examples. So now I am doing something that tries to cut through the enormity of data, and splinters a lifestream into specific areas of focus. It’s an editing of my lifestream that leads to more intentional documentation. I now am experimenting with projects such as this site, and I’m calling it ‘goal-oriented lifestream design’. I have a goal: manage my finances and stick to a budget. So I am now feeding everything finance related in my life into this site, so I can first simply VISUALIZE my financial situation, and then measure it (with services and widgets), and then begin consciously manage it. I have a workflow that I’m pretty happy with, that I try to outline in the diagram below:

So with financial lifestreaming, I’m using a few specific technologies and services to visualize, measure, and manage my data. 1. VISUALIZATION. I’m using software called Skitch which allows me to take screengrab images. I take screengrabs each time I pay a bill or get notice about my accounts or see something I want to try. Then I email the images to my financiallifestream.posterous.com account. Those images get automatically forwarded to this Wordpress site, and are imported as posts (using the FeedWordpress plugn). This creates a visual record of my financial activity and also allows me to keep detailed notes and running commentary.

MEASURING. Images of bill payments are great for motivation and recordkeeping. But without hard numbers that are kept up-to-date, it’s hard to see where exactly I stand. So I’m beginning to use services like Mint.com and Wesabe.com to keep track of all my financial accounts in one place.

These services take a lot of work. It is complicated to get all your accounts set up, and some accounts just won’t work (like my student loan accounts). But if you’re willing to put in the time, they help you to see exactly what’s going on with your finances. Wesabe even lets you track cash expenses through Twitter:

But I want more. I want to make some of my financial data public–things like budgets and goals. The reason for this is simple: if other people can see me meet my budget each month (or fail to meet it), I have more extrinsic motivation and reasons to be accountable. Talking about your goals and sharing your progress creates community. Lots of people have offered helpful suggestions about my various bills and the like, which they would not have been able to do if I wasn’t publicly posting about it. So basically, I want some widgets from Mint and Wesabe to put on my site. Most specifically, I want a widget of Wesabe’s “Spending Targets”:

I’ll be contacting Marc…

MANAGING. I’m hoping by visualizing and measuring my financial data, I’ll be able to better manage my behavior. One area I have yet to mention is income generation. This will certainly be the subject of future posts, and it’s the most murky as of yet. But managing efforts to generate income is just as important as tracking spending and expenses. How do you manage your financial life? Some of my friends have mentioned spreadsheets, which I have yet to delve into. How do you keep track of your finance and monitor your behaviors? What motivates you to stick to a budget? How do you create your budget in the first place?