Power Wallet Review

No one will argue that Mint.com is the leader in the online financial management sector. It has many great uses and lots of praise from users. New to the scene is Power Wallet. This website offers plenty of benefits including setting up a budget, managing monthly bills, and helping you to save money through local offers, codes and daily deals. Below is a review of Power Wallet.

Power Wallet Background

Power Wallet began in early 2012 as a beta, or test site. When the beta version was complete (meaning they fixed any major errors, issues and bugs from the testing period) the full site was launched in September 2012.

Signing Up

Sign up with Power Wallet is easy. First of all, it is completely free. To complete the sign up process, you need to provide the following information:

• Your full name
• Your email address
• Date of Birth (year)
• Zip Code

You will also need to set up security questions and confirm your email address and create a password. Once this is done (and it only takes 5 minutes) you can begin using Power Wallet.

Power Wallet Features

Power Wallet is just like the other online financial management sites where it aggregates your accounts into one place. You can choose to link your accounts so that Power Wallet pulls the information from the financial institution websites or you can manually update and manage the accounts. Highlights of the site includes:

• Plan ahead and create custom budgets by categorizing transactions
• Get an overview of your current financial situation by seeing all of your online bills and financial accounts in once secure place
• Organize your finances and live within your means with spending limit alerts
• Create bank, credit, investment and cash account
• Manage and stay on top of your bills with bill pay alerts
• Bank level security and read-only access to your bank accounts
• Plan and budget on the go with PowerWallet’s mobile site
• Get deals and coupons that are customized to your geographical location (reason for entering your zip code during signup) and spending history
• Get rewards and savings with the PowerCard rewards program

Dashboard

When you log on to your account, you start off at the Dashboard. This is an overview of all of your accounts, your monthly income and spending and a handful of recent transactions. The layout of the dashboard (and the entire site for that matter) is very clean and well organized.

At the top of the page there are a few tabs including accounts, transactions, plan and perks. The accounts tab is self explanatory as the section where you can add accounts. The same goes for the plan tab, which is where you set up your budget and monitor it and make any needed changes.

Transactions

The transactions tab is very useful in that it shows all of your recent transactions. You can filter these by account and edit them as well. Another feature is adding keywords to transactions so that you can easily find certain transactions based on those keywords.

Lastly, within this section you will see “Power Saver” deals. These deals are listed throughout certain transactions and are related to specific deals and offers in your area. For example, if you sorted your transactions by category and were looking at auto expenses, you might see a Power Saver deal for oil changes. This is a great feature and it seems as though it is limited to a certain number of deals so that they don’t overtake the screen or deter you from what you are trying to do.

Perks

The final tab is the perks tab. Here you will find Living Social, Groupon, and other local deals as well other other offers for you to take advantage of. As of this writing, the points section is not fully functional, but should be relatively soon. The intent of the points area is to reward you with points that you can redeem them on various purchases. You earn points through adding accounts, referring friends, creating plans, setting alerts, and more.

Overall Thoughts

My overall thoughts about Power Wallet is that it is great. As I mentioned before, the layout is very clean and it’s super easy to navigate and find your way around. The one thing that I like best is that it works. I’ve used Mint in the past and always had errors when it tried to access my account. It became so frequent that I ended up refrained from using Mint and canceled my account. I don’t have that issue with Power Wallet.

There really aren’t any negatives that I can name. It’s a shame that the points system is not currently set up, but that should not be a deterrent to creating an account. If you are a Mint user or someone looking for a new online account management site, I highly encourage you try out Power Wallet. It’s completely free and a breeze to use. To sign up, click on the picture below.

Tagged as: credit, Cutting Expenses, Debt, Frugal, Investing, Personal Finance Basics, Retirement, Savings Accounts, spending