LearnVest app adds financial planner for premium users

Personal finance app, LearnVest, has evolved from a finance eduction site for women to a tool that consolidates financial accounts, tracks spending and income, shows trends and helps create a budget for better money management for free. It’s premium service now offers investors access to a financial planner who assists customers to determine strategies for growing and saving money.

What I like about the online personal finance tool LearnVest is that all the features for budgeting money and tracking expenses are accompanied by information to help users become more financially literate. LearnVest began as a personal finance education website for women, but it has grown in the last year or two into a Web app that's similar to Mint.com. Its roots still show, however, thanks to all the educational material on the site.

With a free account, you can authorize LearnVest to pull in line-item details from your financial accounts—everything from credit cards to checking accounts. LearnVest tracks spending and income, shows trends over time, and helps you create budgets to manage your money. In what it accomplishes, LearnVest is extremely similar to Mint, our Editors' Choice for personal finance sites. Mint is a little more polished and has more features, however. LearnVest also offers to connect you with a financial planner, though you have to pay a sign-up fee and monthly subscription for this service. A few other features in LearnVest are reserved for paying members only. Mint, however, is entirely free and leaves all the planning and strategizing about your money up to you. If you don't like Mint, LearnVest is definitely worth investigating. Both work with U.S. bank accounts, and Mint also supports Canadian banks.

Pricing

It's free to use LearnVest to track your transactions and create budgets, but you'll see some sales messages enticing you to get in touch with a financial planner, for an extra cost. There's a $299 setup charge, and then a $19-per-month fee for the services.

For that price, you get a financial planner with whom you can discuss the nitty-gritty details of your financial matters. The financial planner also helps create your online LearnVest profile. LearnVest says that its financial planners do not manage assets, place trades, or make specific investment recommendations, although they do work with you to determine strategies for growing and saving your money based on your goals. I did not test these services.

Paying members also get a few perks on the website itself, such as access to articles, classes, and online events for learning more about personal finance. Every paying member also gets a document summarizing his or her financial situation; see this sample LearnVest Program document for details.

As I said, Mint is completely free, and here's how it makes money: It shows you relevant ads for financial services. What that means in practice is Mint sees the interest rates on your accounts and suggests services that will have a better rate. You might see other kinds of financial services advertisements, too, but those are the ones I see. By and large, they are analytical in nature and actually quite useful.

More details about LearnVest's premium financial services are available online.

Using LearnVest

Anyone can sign up for a LearnVest account, although the site only supports U.S. financial institutions. You can reside anywhere in the world to use LearnVest, but only your U.S. bank accounts will work with the site.

As with many online personal finance tools, including Mint and PocketGuard, LearnVest has you start by connecting your financial accounts. You type in your username and password or access code (depending on how your bank handles third-party access) to give LearnVest the ability to pull in detailed information from your accounts, such as line items, available balance, balance, and amount owed. This information is read-only. In other words, LearnVest doesn't have permission to do anything with your money. The only thing it can do is pull in information.

The site walks you through the setup process, and it's pretty simple. It could take anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes, depending on how many financial accounts you have and how much customizing you want to do.

Like Mint, LearnVest finds all your transactions and account balances, both current and historical (up to a few months back), to give you a picture of your net worth as well as insights into where you typically spend your money.

Seeing all this information within minutes of signing up for the site is a huge advantage of using online personal finance tools versus desktop tools that don't connect directly to your online accounts. When you use personal finance software that requires manual entries, such as Dollarbird and Checkbook, you begin logging expenses the day you install the app, and it takes time to collect data. With LearnVest and other tools like it, however, you get to see months' worth of spending and saving habits immediately.

A dashboard shows you your net worth with a breakdown of assets and debts. You also see an overview of your budget. Below them are details about which accounts you have linked to LearnVest and how much money is in each of them. The dashboard shows your spending over time on a bar graph, as well as your priorities (i.e., financial goals).

At the bottom of the dashboard you'll find a display of recent articles, such as "Your Must-Read Money Stories of the Week: How the Fed Rate Hike Could Affect You" and "7 Tricks to Help You Save Cash on Your Utility Bills This Winter." A Must-Read link at the top of the page brings you to more articles.

Similar to Mint, LearnVest also has a LearnVest mobile app for iPhone and Android. The beauty of mobile personal finance apps in general is that they give you quick insight into your financial situation when you're out and about, which could mean in the moment of spending. If you're going to use LearnVest, it's worth it to download the free app and become familiar with it.

Tracking Your Finances

Similar to Mint, LearnVest automatically classifies transactions into categories such as Groceries, Bills, Personal Care, and so forth. If LearnVest can't make a good guess as to the correct category, it leaves it unclassified. You then have the opportunity to go through the list of everything that's Unclassified, item by item, and assign them all correctly.

One annoyance with classifying expenses is that LearnVest doesn't learn from its mistakes. In Mint, it's easy to create a rule for recurring corrections, such as "always rename TimeWrnrCbl to Time Warner Cable," or "always mark purchases from Parrot Coffee as groceries (not coffee shops)." In LearnVest, it's not possible, so you'll end up correcting the same errors over and over again manually.

Sometimes expenses need to be split, and LearnVest has tools for that. Say I go to my favorite coffee shop and spend $18 on a fancy coffee and a bag of coffee beans. I'd like to classify $16 as "groceries" for the beans and only $2 as "restaurant" spending. LearnVest lets you do that. You can divide any transaction into as many as seven separately categorized transactions.

Or say you withdrew money from the ATM and want to categorize the cash that you spend. LearnVest has an Add Cash button, which could probably be labeled more clearly as "cash transaction" or some sort. Nevertheless, you can log having spent $3 in cash at the coffee shop, and even tick a box indicating the cash came from your most recent ATM withdrawal. Mint has similar tools. LearnVest also has an option to hide a transaction, which is good. With Mint, you can hide not only a transaction, but also an account, which is helpful for people who share an account but don't want to see its data points in their own spending history.

The budgeting tools are decent. To set up a budget, LearnVest walks you through the process and keeps it pretty simple. You enter your income, fixed costs, priority goals, and flex spending. It has some neat tools in particular for figuring out credit card debt. LearnVest pulls your balance and the interest rate. You enter the minimum payment due each month. Then you use a slider bar to see how long it will take you to pay off the debt if you pay the minimum balance or a larger amount.

You can't do anything complicated with budgets, such as implementing rollover rules. For example, if my entertainment budget for any given month is $80, but I only spend $40 this month, then next month I should be allotted $120. Or, if my coffee budget is $30 per month, and I spend $40 this month, next month I should only be allowed to spend $20. That's the kind of deeper feature you'll find in more manual personal finance apps, such as YNAB (it stands for You Need a Budget) and Mvelopes, but it's not in LearnVest or Mint.

A Real Competitor to Mint

Personal finance service LearnVest is very similar to Mint, except that it's a little simpler and has fewer features, but more reading material. It also tries to sell you on using one of its personal financial planners. If you're looking for a financial planner, that may be a key reason to try LearnVest. But if you like to keep an eye on your spending habits, goals, and net worth on your own, Mint is slightly better and the Editors' Choice for personal finance apps at PCMag.