DebtGoal Adds Aggregating Features

We’ve written a lot about DebtGoal (here and here)in the past here at PLR, so it seems like a good idea to point out some new features they’ve recently launched.

DebtGoal now has aggregating capabilities now! This will make the data-entry a lot simpler. Previously it required you to enter your statement, interest rate, new purchases and all payments made. I sometimes make several payments in a month, depending on how business is going, so I was spending a lot of time on the DebtGoal site punching in numbers.

DebtGol continues to improve the usefulness of their charts and graphs as relevant to the user interactive experience, however the “on track” features are still a little wonky. The sum of my minimum monthly payments is just $26. DebtGoal is “pushing” me to go to $91. Following this plan, I’ll be debt free sometime in 2045. Yay for me! Actually, we’re planning to be free and clear by the end of this year following a far more aggressive plan) DebtGoal’s slider will only go as far as $91, so I’ll play with it more and fudge my minimum payments a bit higher to see if that makes it work right for me.

What I’d really love to see DebtGoal do, is to add a calculator like CNN’s.The CNN calculator allows you to either choose what you can pledge towards your goal and get a date from that; or choose a date and get a dollar goal. So far, I haven’t found a way to change my DebtGoal “debt free date” to 12/31/09.

I see the value in most of the tools on the site, but my favorite parts are the blog and message boards, which are a wealth of information—especially for math nerds like myself who enjoy seeing compound interest reversed and reduced.

And yes, while DebtGoal is aggregating now, I’m passing on that feature and continue to manually-enter my data. I begged for an aggregating feature, but I’m still concerned about their ability to scale, and after my previous adventure—receiving someone else’s statement—I want to give them a little more time to work out any kinks that might arise before I air any more of my financial laundry than necessary.


Jessica Ward is a freelance writer and blogger from Seattle. She writes on family, money and business. For frugal family tips you can also see her blog at www.pennywisefamily.blogspot.com.

DebtGoal Responds to Security Breach

I want to clarify, I got this email a few days ago but I haven't been well and haven't posted DebtGoal's reply to my questions due to illness. I requested a more complete reply from DebtGoal about the nature of the problem and how they'd like to respond. I actually received the response on Sunday, and I'm attaching that below.

Here's a response that you can post on the blog. LMK if you think I could be more effective. We really do care about this stuff and work hard to make a great product. We missed something on this one and we learn from it and move on.

********************

Jessica

Thanks for your ongoing coverage of DebtGoal.com. You've been a great supporter and have given us a lot of valuable feedback that has truly helped us create a better service.

As you pointed out in your recent blog post, we did experience a bug last Friday where we sent out a limited number of monthly progress report emails with inaccurate statement data. We traced the issue to a memory buffer error that failed at high volumes to clear after each email was generated. We have implemented a fix for this bug and resent corrected monthly reports a few hours after the issue was identified.

We apologize for the error, as we know that you and our other users put your trust in us to help you manage your finances. As a result of this issue, we are revising our Quality Assurance practices to better detect these issues through automated validation and live error detection. It's never possible to eliminate all possibility of errors, but the changes we are implementing will lead to much more robust releases.

Above all, I want to communicate that we do take quality and security seriously. We will continue to proactively improve our processes and quality. As we're in Alpha release, some of this QA work is done by our users and we remain very appreciative for the suggestions and feedback that we get on a daily basis and thankful for their understanding when things don't go exactly according to plan. Thanks again for your support and feedback.

Scott Crawford
CEO, DebtGoal.com

DebtGoal: How big can a 'glitch' be and still be a 'glitch?'

Today I was shocked to learn that in the past month I've made zero progress towards paying off the balance on my Target Visa card, which sits at a whopping 20% interest rate.

Mostly, I was surprised because I've never had a Target card. I've also never had a credit card with a 20% interest rate. I'm sure you can imagine my shock!

That said, I'm sure someone else was even more surprised when they opened their DebtGoal statement and discovered that they owe USAA the cost of roughly one month in Africa plus airfare for three. (Sometimes I still surprise myself).

As it turns out, a "glitch" occurred in DebtGoal's system that mistakenly sent someone else's statements to "a limited number of users."

Thankfully, DebtGoal doesn't actually collect account numbers, and I didn't receive any identifying information about the person whose statement I received. I communicated with DebtGoal and was told it was an error, which affected only some of their users, and a few hours later received an accurate statement.

It did get me reconsidering though. I leave all of my organizing to the Web. I'm responsible for little file storage or organization of actual "paper" some free Web service is out there for everything. My digital photos are all stored online (presuming this to be FAR more reliable than my hard drive or a DVD my kids are likely to turn into a school construction project).

According to an article from TechCrunch in April, Facebook, Twitter and Google Documents have all recently had similar breaches. I myself have experienced mis-directed Twitter tweets, and even some people have complained of trying to view my profile and getting someone elses' (usually SPAM-intense or otherwise offensive) profile.

Just how much faith should we have in the cloud? What can our providers do to ensure that we won't have our personal information or bank account balances eventually being tied to our google profiles because of some security "glitch."

Which brings me to my last point...someone must distinguish the lines between a security "anomaly," "glitch," "error," "leak," and an all-out "hemorrhage."

Don't be mistaken, I'm not unhappy with DebtGoal, they didn't release sensitive information to me, mostly just confusing. I don't think they even store sensitive data (their structure wouldn't require it). That said, other sites I use regularly do. Sometimes I use a favorite site like Amazon, Paypal or other to see what my credit card number actually is--as I shredded it a few months ago. If they're the only ones that still know my credit card number, I really want to make sure its safe. Exactly how much should we be trusting "the cloud?"

Update: DebtGoal responds to security breach

Jessica Ward is a freelance writer from Seattle. She writes on personal finance, technology and family. To learn more, visit www.jessicaward.me or follow her on Twitter at @jessc098

Just in Time for FINOVATE: Many Companies Launching New Features

Just in time for FINOVATE many new features are being launched by participant companies, some of which we've profiled here before.

I'm following the conference online today via webcast, though wishing I could be in beautiful San Fransisco, which is lovely this time of year.

I'm starting this list with items I've already made notes of, but may update later during the day as I follow along the FINOVATE presentations today.

• Mint (see previous my review) has added CD and Brokerage shopping options. I wish they had this when I choose my brokerage two months ago, but I'm glad they have it now, and I'm glad to see I chose well. They've also added the ability to change dates on transactions which is great for those checks that clear late and things like that, so you can keep your budget on track.

• Lending Club is offering new lender features which Tom posted about earlier today.

• Prosper is live now!

• Wesabe has a tagging system now, which will be a great asset to users.

• Debtgoal (my review) has a brand-new interface which is far more useful and intuitive.

• SmartHippo (my review) has a new questions and answers page at www.smarthippo.com/answers.

• UPDATE: It's 3:00 and I just got an email from GreenSherpa that their beta system is now available.

• UPDATE: it's 4:30 and Rudder just launched an iPhone app. You can get it in the app store. Now word about what's out there for blackberry users.

• SmartyPig continues to respond to customers in real-time, and has added a "lower this" to reduce your monthly savings if friends and family members' contributions to your savings goal has enabled you to choose between meeting your goal sooner, or reducing your monthly contribution. It suggests the difference for you too, so you don't have to do the math.

Jessica Ward is a professional writer and blogger based in Seattle, WA. She also blogs at www.pennywisefamily.blogspot.com, to learn more about her visit www.jessicaward.me

Makeover at DebtGoal.com

I posted earlier this month about DebtGoal.com, one of the many up-and-coming financial services companies that will be participating in FINOVATE later this month.

I wanted to let Prosper Lending Review readers that the site has gotten a dramatic face-lift today and is far easier to use and navigate. Data-entry is simpler and the results more useful.

The interface has a much better "Web 2.0 feel" and the charts and tables are relevant and well-placed. Overall, it is intuitive and comfortable.

They are not yet aggregating but that is in the works. I've also suggested a couple of ideas that would be helpful--for instance, flagging recurring transactions. I'm really encouraged by how quickly this company is jumping to implementing user recommendations.

If you haven't checked out DebtGoal.com yet, or if you have and didn't like what you saw, I encourage you to give it another try.

Finovate 2009: DebtGoal.com Review

In case you’ve forgotten, Finovate 2009 begins on April 28th. In advance of the conference, we’re profiling a lot of the presenting companies. One of these companies is GoalSpring’s DebtGoal.com product.

DebtGoal.com is a free tool intended to help users get out of debt. I’ve had a few conversations with the DebtGoal team (I’m an alpha-tester) and they really are passionate about helping people get out of debt, and stay out. While DebtGoal is currently a little rough around the edges, I’m excited to see what’s coming up next—as I know they’re working on some new projects.

Right now with DebtGoal you enter your debts, payments and interest rates (no account numbers or other scary things), aggregation is “in the hopper” in the next phase rollout, but at this point everything is manual data-entry. I’m hoping that they’ll allow an “enter manually” option for technophobes who are nervous about the aggregating systems. I personally love them, but I can understand those who don’t.

Using your outstanding debts and interest rates, DebtGoal produces a payoff plan for you and suggests paying off in the order of highest interest to lowest interest, and based on the minimum payment requirements, it sets payment schedule for you, based on your budget and priorities for these debts. I personally adhere to the “snowball method” of paying the smallest balance first, closing the account and then moving on to the others. I’ve requested that DebtGoal provide both options. Not sure if they’ll be able to incorporate that feature, but it seems like both methods are sound.




Why use a system like DebtGoal? I think it can help if you’re juggling multiple credit accounts and overwhelmed by deciding what to pay on what account. Perhaps you find yourself paying minimums only because you can’t decide or don’t know what to do about the next one. Then you’ll just make a big payment with the “extra” at the end of the month, right? DebtGoal encourages you to make a goal and stick with it. It can also help you plan your monthly budget so you know how much to set aside for each bill.


Another nice feature is that it shows you how long it will take you to get out of debt if you pay only minimum balances. I set a goal to be debt free by the end of this year, and adjusted my Mint.com budget accordingly. You can chose either a desired debt-free date, or tell DebtGoal your desired combined monthly debt-payment budget, and they will show you the smartest way to allocate, and provide you with a debt-free date based on that plan.


One feature that I really like, and haven’t seen other places, is that it shows new spending separately, by basically showing you that you have to pay A: your regular debt-busting budget amount and B: your new spending to keep up on your goal.

I’ll attach a screenshot here, but for my pride’s sake, I’ve removed my account balances. Rest assured, this will be paid off by year’s end. I’m on track!

If you have debt and you’d like a nice graphical way to tackle that, I’d encourage you to give DebtGoal.com a try!