Almost two years ago, we wrote a survey of the 10 leading personal finance sites. In the intervening months, three have shut down, one has been folded into another and a fifth, Mint, has been acquired. That's quite a grisly faceplant for a sector in which we could find 10 companies to profile.

One user, Rob Darling, bemoaned the loss of the service.

"Too bad. I liked this service since I could upload my data rather than allowing it to connect directly to my bank accounts."

Westlund said users can delete their information until July 31. Wesabe will provide additional tools to export client financial information off the site and will keep the discussion area on the site open indefinitely.

Editor's note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we'll be looking at how online finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping online finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

Mint: Leading the Charge

Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online.

Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you.

Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta. Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week.

Mint's success didn't go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn't plan to compete in the market anymore. Correction: In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi.

Beyond Mint

While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it's by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint.

ClearCheckbook.com, for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online.

A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe, for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint.

Since acquiring Exepnsr, Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo - which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting.

Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax, for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K.

Going Mobile

Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe, for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone - either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert.

Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America, Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example.

When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due.

What's Next?

Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software.

This is the first post in our upcoming series about online finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Online Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though.

We like this idea and it's clear that many people want to use online services to monitor and manage their finances. There's no doubt that many of the Telegraph's tens of millions of monthly visitors wouldn't have found out about Wesabe any other way. It does sound like a great convenience, as the company says, to be able to manage money in the same place that you get your news.

We suspect that there will be richer integration of Wesabe into Telegraph pages in the future. We can imagine, for example, news recommendations based on a reader's investment history. Something like the recent LinkedIn/NYTimes partnership.

Still, we wonder how comfortable people will be with this particular choice of partners.

Do You Want the Newspaper to Have a Direct Line to Your Finances?

Privacy is a touchy concern and it's generally assumed that personal finances are one of the most private matters in peoples' lives. None the less, online personal finance services like Wesabe and competitor Mint are growing fast. The value they are able to add on top of existing banking options online is substantial, though there may not be a big barrier to entry if established banks decide to offer similar features.

Partnership options are always interesting, and technology plays in finance are often fascinating - but the newspaper? We're not sure that an institution founded on the premise that it tells everyone everything is really the best choice to do personal finance through.

We like the idea of newspapers working with data (see what The Guardian is doing), but not necessarily our personal financial data - even if it is worked with in anonymous aggregate. Are we alone in that thinking? We doubt it.

What about readers? Are you comfortable, excited even, with the prospect of doing personal finance through your local newspaper? We suspect our readers are disproportionately uninterested in such things as you are more likely to know about these services independently. Still, isn't there something a little crazy about this?

Readers interested in learning more about this sector should check out our recent podcast edition of ReadWriteTalk on the topic, with executives from Wesabe, Mint and Tip'd as guests.

You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

• Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint, a popular online money management service. (RWW coverage of Mint)
• Gabe Griego, Vice President of Marketing at Wesabe, a "part money management tool, part community" service. (Wesabe was profiled in our recent round-up post Banking 2.0: Money Management Moves to The Cloud)
• Mu Saleem, Community Director of Tip'd, a new online community "for financial news, ideas, and tips".

RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati, with Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb on the call.

Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call (Sean, Marshall, Steve and myself) will do our best to ask your question.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

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