Russell Beattie took the words out of my mouth while writing his blog post I hate money. Money management is just not fun for me and therefore gets very little attention. I could have bought a house a few years ago, but didn’t do it simply because I wasn’t interested in investing the time to learn the ropes. I actually was successful in using Quicken for a full 3 months last year. I tracked my income vs. spending and became a lot more aware of where my money was going. I just did not like the fact that I had to allocate time a few times a week to start Quicken, update my accounts, categorize items, fix miscategorized items, and reconcile my checking account.
I believe its time for financial management software to meet RSS. How cool would it be if my RSS aggregator notified me that a transaction has been posted to my credit card? Now instead of setting aside time each month to do my finances, I can process a little bit a time while I read my news and go about my daily activities. The feed would link to my online money management software which would then allow me to categorize and process the transaction(s), and generate real-time graphs of my spending vs. income. Ofcourse some security details with RSS would have to be worked out, but this would make my life a lot easier. Another idea for a Rails project?