Yapta.com

We all know that airline ticket prices can fluctuate significantly from day to day. I can remember a few times while planning a vacation that I would be quoted a price for a ticket and the next day the price changed.

Yapta was created to help individuals with this issue. On Yapta, individuals can search flights, track flights and instantly notify you when the price drops. But one of the best features by far is that once you book the flight, Yapta will continue to track the price of the ticket and if the price drops, will help you rebook at the lower price. And all this is free.

I have not used this service yet since the past couple of flights I have booked have been with airline miles. But on the surface, this seems like a great service. The site claims that over $66 million dollars have been saved since May 2007 with an average savings of $227 per ticket.

Couple observations -

• Most airlines charge a rebooking fee to cancel and rebook your flight. Yapta does consider the rebooking fee when considering a price drop
• Most major domestic and international airlines are included in their tracking feature. Most domestic airlines are included in the rebooking feature while most international airlines are not. One notable exception for both is Southwest.

This is definitely a site I plan to use in the future.

Consumer squeeze...

Last week, Yahoo Finance posted an article about expected FY2009 raises. More specifically, the article highlighted how more and more companies are implementing policies where high performers receive much higher raises then average or lower performers. My employer has had this type of policy for years.

The following table is from article (courtesy of Yahoo Finance) -



While the average is around 3.8%, the article states that the range from high performers to low performers is 5.6% to 0.6%. The purpose of this post is not to discuss the "pay for performance" model, but to discuss the expected average FY2009 raise versus current inflation.

Last week, the BLS released the most recent CPI numbers which showed an annual inflation rate of around 5.6%. Some experts even suggest that the BLS inflation numbers are artificially low. For argument's sake, let's assume the BLS numbers are accurate. This means that is real terms, the average employee will be about 2% less well off in FY2009 as they were in FY2008 (assuming the above numbers are correct and inflation holds steady at these levels).

Talk about consumers being squeezed... Not the type of news that is needed given the state of the housing market and spill over into equities.

Mint.com

Mint.com is a relatively new company in the world of personal finance. According to the website, the public beta was launched in September 2007 after two years of development.

Mint can be described as an all in one money management portal (although we'll see a bit later that they are not truly all in one yet). Think of Quicken or Microsoft Money without a lot of the clutter.

Mint was very easy to set up. They claim to be able to connect to nearly 6,500 financial institutions. I was easily able to set up my checking, brokerage, retirement and credit card accounts. Each time you log onto Mint, the system automatically downloads the most recent activity in the accounts.

The expense tracking is top of the line and in my option currently the best feature of Mint. Each expense is automatically assigned a category when it is downloaded (i.e. Mobil expenses go to gas, TGI Friday expenses go to restaurants). If you disagree with the category, you can easily change it and apply the change to all future purchases from that vendor.

Based on expense information, Mint automatically tracks expense trends by category and by month. For example, you can easily see how much you are spending on food per month over the past few months. Mint also allows you to set up monthly budgets and track against those budgets.

Mint also offers some additional features which I have not really taken advantage of. These include comparing your spending to others and their recommended products.

Where I would like Mint to expand their services is related to income and investments. There is not currently a lot of information on your entire income statement. They focus on expenses, but you never really see the entire picture of income and expenses by months. Also, there is currently no information on investments. The website states that the tool is being built, but there is not a lot of detail on what the tool will look like once launched. I believe the depth of this tool will be important to make them stand out from other personal finance software.

Overall Mint is a great tool for tracking expenses. It quickly allows you to track each of your transactions by category, examine the overall trends and set budgets. They still have some work to do in the other categories to make it the best personal finance software on the market.