JustThrive.com Review
I've been using a couple of different online budgeting/financial programs. Probably since about last October or so. I've been extremely happy with the performance that Mint.com offers me. I have two small beefs with it.
1) If it doesn't automatically pull your interest rate it is almost impossible to change it in a timely fashion.
2) You can't set up savings goals or programs to track your overall goal progress. You kind of can on a month by month basis if you set up an individual budget for that item. But I don't want to track and view that the same way that I want to track if I'm over budget on eating out this month.
3) It is really wrong about the purchase prices on my investments and therefore when it looks at how much money I've made or lost - it's wrong. Really wrong. Then when you compare it to the NASDAQ or whatever - it says I'm way lower - when in reality if it tracked it properly - I'd be way higher. Super annoying.
I will be honest, I've been extremely disappointed with JustThrive.com Extremely disappointed.
1) It doesn't pull account information properly or in a timely manor (sometimes it is 5 days or more behind.)
2) It is absolutely impossible to change your interest rates on your account. I've emailed them. They're "working on it" that was back in November.
3) Their financial "health" rating system is wack. Completely wack. There's no good reason why a good algorithm would give me 2.3 in the begining of the month and now mid-month I'm at a 9.3. That's way too big of a swing in a month. There is no rhymm or reason behind my "health" each month. It just kind of does what it wants. I think it would be a great too if they could get it up and running properly.
4) It has no idea what the interest rates on my credit cards or savings accounts are. It can't pull them automaticaly.
5) It gives me suggestions for something like a higher interest rate on a savings account at another bank - only it's not accurate. Instead of the advertised 4% - when you go look on the banks website it's change to 3.02%. What's the point of a suggestion if it's wrong?
6) Why can't I log in from the home page? Why do I have to click another button so then I can log my information in? That's just plain bad web design.
7) There is no real way to track my investments. I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments - but it's a major part of my overall financial picture. All it tells me is my balance in my accounts, not what I'm invested in or how it is doing compared to the market.
My only question: Is anyone actually working there? All the changes lately seem to have been for the worse. The financial "health" rating just seems to swing way more than it used to within a given month. Shouldn't there be a weighted average or something going instead of an instantaneous snapshot of my account that applies to financial "health"? Why does it take so long to implement something that is critical to account. If your system can't pull the information properly why can't I input it for myself. Mint.com doesn't have a great system to do it - it's really awkward and you can't always access it, but at least they have SOMETHING. Do they never update their ad suggestions? Don't you earn money on those? Shouldn't you be updating them all the time. It really feels like they were doing something with the site and making changes up until about the end of November - then they just pooped out and quite doing anything and have let the site die. Did you guys run out of money or something and had to lay your engineering staff off? That's what it seems like.
I think what I'm really doing is pleading to Mint.com to add savings goals and trackers to their site. The only reason I even look at JustThrive.com right now is because of their savings goal things. It helps me take a bigger picture overlook of my savings and set up goals and figure out how much I need to save a month to reach them.
In other finacial news - I opened a E*TRADE savings account today. They had a decent rate and I wanted to start seperating out my savings into different accounts for different purposes. I think that this one is going to be for vacation savings. While it spreads out my money into more accounts - I think it will be really useful to see that that account is increasing in value for it's indended purpose. Kind of like what I want Mint to do - just with different accounts.
1) If it doesn't automatically pull your interest rate it is almost impossible to change it in a timely fashion.
2) You can't set up savings goals or programs to track your overall goal progress. You kind of can on a month by month basis if you set up an individual budget for that item. But I don't want to track and view that the same way that I want to track if I'm over budget on eating out this month.
3) It is really wrong about the purchase prices on my investments and therefore when it looks at how much money I've made or lost - it's wrong. Really wrong. Then when you compare it to the NASDAQ or whatever - it says I'm way lower - when in reality if it tracked it properly - I'd be way higher. Super annoying.
I will be honest, I've been extremely disappointed with JustThrive.com Extremely disappointed.
1) It doesn't pull account information properly or in a timely manor (sometimes it is 5 days or more behind.)
2) It is absolutely impossible to change your interest rates on your account. I've emailed them. They're "working on it" that was back in November.
3) Their financial "health" rating system is wack. Completely wack. There's no good reason why a good algorithm would give me 2.3 in the begining of the month and now mid-month I'm at a 9.3. That's way too big of a swing in a month. There is no rhymm or reason behind my "health" each month. It just kind of does what it wants. I think it would be a great too if they could get it up and running properly.
4) It has no idea what the interest rates on my credit cards or savings accounts are. It can't pull them automaticaly.
5) It gives me suggestions for something like a higher interest rate on a savings account at another bank - only it's not accurate. Instead of the advertised 4% - when you go look on the banks website it's change to 3.02%. What's the point of a suggestion if it's wrong?
6) Why can't I log in from the home page? Why do I have to click another button so then I can log my information in? That's just plain bad web design.
7) There is no real way to track my investments. I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments - but it's a major part of my overall financial picture. All it tells me is my balance in my accounts, not what I'm invested in or how it is doing compared to the market.
My only question: Is anyone actually working there? All the changes lately seem to have been for the worse. The financial "health" rating just seems to swing way more than it used to within a given month. Shouldn't there be a weighted average or something going instead of an instantaneous snapshot of my account that applies to financial "health"? Why does it take so long to implement something that is critical to account. If your system can't pull the information properly why can't I input it for myself. Mint.com doesn't have a great system to do it - it's really awkward and you can't always access it, but at least they have SOMETHING. Do they never update their ad suggestions? Don't you earn money on those? Shouldn't you be updating them all the time. It really feels like they were doing something with the site and making changes up until about the end of November - then they just pooped out and quite doing anything and have let the site die. Did you guys run out of money or something and had to lay your engineering staff off? That's what it seems like.
I think what I'm really doing is pleading to Mint.com to add savings goals and trackers to their site. The only reason I even look at JustThrive.com right now is because of their savings goal things. It helps me take a bigger picture overlook of my savings and set up goals and figure out how much I need to save a month to reach them.
In other finacial news - I opened a E*TRADE savings account today. They had a decent rate and I wanted to start seperating out my savings into different accounts for different purposes. I think that this one is going to be for vacation savings. While it spreads out my money into more accounts - I think it will be really useful to see that that account is increasing in value for it's indended purpose. Kind of like what I want Mint to do - just with different accounts.
Comments
1) Account updates. Your information updates nightly with the transactions provided by your bank - unfortunately, some banks are slower than others, as their legal obligation to let you know about transactions is somewhat hazy.
We're doing several things here. First, when someone tells us their bank is slow, we do what we can to try to help make the bank faster; shoot an e-mail to support@justthrive.com and we'll do our best to help. Second, we're working with lawmakers to make sure that legislation gets passed that forces your bank to update your information in a timely manner. Third, we've improved our internal system to speed up transaction processing, and would like to add an "update now" button for when you really need the absolutely freshest information (rather than your normal nightly update).
2) We are still working on this, as the problem is not a simple one: if you change your interest rate once, does that mean we should leave it changed forever and expect you to keep up with it? When do we revert it automatically? While we work on ways to do this, we added algorithms that computer your interest rate when the bank doesn't provide it or provides it incorrectly. It can't be exact, but it will get pretty close - it actually looks at the interest you earn (or, in the case of credit cards, your finance charges) to determine the rate.
3) There is rhyme or reason, we promise, but I'm entirely with you that it swings too much at the moment. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, we have to deal with not enough information or incorrect information, in cases where users don't tag their spending. Two, we actually are refining the metric right now based on the data in the system. That is, at the beginning, we simply estimated the correct parameters for the algorithm - at this point, we're going back through and revising those estimates based on the actual data we've seen. So with more time, it will continue to improve and will smooth out.
4) See 2.
5) This is another data limitation problem. We're only as good at the data we get from banks, and they don't update us in as timely a manner as they could, particularly lately, when interest rates seem to change daily. We've done some internal work on this, and we also have worked with banks to make this faster - have you checked it out lately?
6) The home page is http, your login is https, and if we mix the two in one page, you'll get warning that may confused more basic users. So we do it for security reasons and we'll be working to make this smoother in the future.
7) I'm with you, but only up to a point. Thrive was founded to give financial advice to a group of people that normally haven't had access to it, and to help people take their first financial steps. While we do plan to add more detailed investment features, we're concentrating on the things people need to get their financial life off the ground.
In response to your only question, yes, there are many of us working here. Yes, financial health does use an average over time, and the longer you are in the system, the more stable it should get as the data points are expanded. It takes a long time to implement things because they are actually, almost always, more difficult than they appear to be - that's the challenge of providing good advice over the web. Nobody else does it for that exact reason: it is hard to get it right, which is why we work so hard at it.
I appreciate your comments; that you took the time to type them out is a favor to us, as it gives us things to work on and we love that.
Since you asked about people working here, my name is Matt Wallaert, I'm a behavioral psychologist, my title is Lead Scientist, which everyone teases me about. =] I work on the Thrive product itself - all the advice, all the algorithms, come by my desk at some point.
If you're ever in NYC, feel free to drop by and I'll introduce you to the rest the team...we love visitors.