personal finance & budgeting

So I recently was on a quest to find a way to make it easier to manage a budget rather than manually entering account and purchase data but still be able to both see all of our accounts (banks, credit cards, mortgage, etc) and also view graphical summaries of expense flow charts. I was amazed with what I found. Quicken Online has a wonderful interface that will automatically sync all of your banks and credit cards - and capture that data as individual expenses and allow you to customize categories for expenses. They provide you with a 30 day free trial and then it is only $2.99 per month. After spending a while organizing our finances (Quicken will retrieve the past 90 days of information from each account), I was impressed to also find out that Bank of America (our primary banking institution) also provides similar abilities under their "My Portfolio" link with their online banking (and for free). I noticed that Bank of America did not allow as much customization as Quicken Online for categorical expenses but I was more satisfied with the graphical results of our budget using Bank of America.

So overall, I am very satisfied with both online services and will need to spend some time over the next month deciding which I will plan to use for the future of our personal budgeting as well as personal finance management. However, for now, I am leaning towards using the free Bank of America's "My Portfolio" - Quicken will have to prove to me that it is worth the extra $3 per month.