personal finance money management

photo: Ben Atkin

According to Techcrunch, since the iPad’s release in April the number of iPad apps has grown to over 10,000. That is still dwarfed by the iPhone’s library of 200,000 apps — and growing — but is still pretty impressive for just a few months on the market.

Since the iPad is still in its infant stages, the app store is relatively light on apps with a specific personal finance focus: most still focus on the gaming and reading niches. (Apple, however, says that almost all of its 200,000 iPhone apps are compatible with the iPad, including the Mint.com mobile app. You could also revisit Mint’s list of the top personal finance apps, published back in February. Alternatively, take a look at Apple’s list of money management iPhone apps.)

Still, we were recently able to find seven iPad apps that, if not directly related to personal finance management, at the very least help you find savings in everyday life situations and, as a result, manage your money more successfully.

Staying true to the Mint money-saving spirit, all but one of the apps are free to download (the other costs only $1.99), and none require a subscription.

Zillow – Free

Zillow has established itself as a great starting point for anyone interested in buying or selling a home. You can search by city or zip, find all homes for sale in the area of your interest, as well as comparable home sales. Once you’ve found a home you’re interested in, you can check out what that home sold for in the past and its estimated value, or “Zestimate.” Why does it make a great mobile app? Because it enables you to take your home search on the road with you: once you hunt down homes you are interested in, you can see them in person, and then take a peak at photos taken from inside the home.

Epicurious – Free

The iPad app from Epicurious.com includes over 28,000 tested recipes from magazines such as Bon Appétit and Gourmet, popular cookbooks, top chefs, and leading restaurants. And the iPad size makes it a great fit as a digital cookbook. What makes it a great personal finance app? Cooking at home is a much cheaper and healthier alternative to eating out!

Grocery IQ – Free

GroceryIQ is a mobile app that allows you to make grocery lists, sync and share them with others (so both you and your significant other don’t come home with a gallon of sauerkraut on the same night), scan barcodes, and even find and send coupons right to your loyalty card. Having a consistent grocery list for each store you shop at is a fail-safe way to keep your grocery expenses down.

Bloomberg – Free

If you like keeping up with your portfolio and business news throughout the day, Bloomberg offers a great iPad app to help you do so. The app offers customized news, stock quotes, company descriptions, market leaders/laggers, price charts, market trends analysis, and more.

Trapster – Free

Trapster has over 7 million users who provide information on speed traps, video enforced speed zones, and police check points. Now, we’re not saying you should recklessly speed around with your Trapster app spitting warnings at you. But most of us have been caught slightly over the speed limit at times, just because we weren’t familiar enough with a given area to be on our guard. Just don’t get caught paying too much attention to Trapster while you’re driving around (that kind of defeats the purpose of the app).

Kayak – Free

The Kayak iPad app, in itself, doesn’t offer any groundbreaking new functionality above the iPhone app or Kayak website. However, Kayak offers such a great airfare comparison interface and with the vibrant large-screen iPad display, it packs even more punch onto one screen.

Compoundee HD – Compound Interest Calculator – $1.99

Compoundee HD is a basic, easy-to-use financial calculator that is able to calculate 5 different investment variables on compound interest calculations at a daily, weekly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual level. You can find out how much an investment will be worth over a period of time and the calculation over email. This app could be extremely useful for real-estate agents and brokers, bankers, and mortgage brokers.

Which iPad personal finance apps make your “best of” list?

GE Miller discusses personal finance topics for young professionals at 20somethingfinance.com.

IT, startups, Finance

Innovating Where Banks Won’t: Talking with Rich Aberman About WePay’s Vision for Group Payments

Wade Roush 7/8/10

It’s too bad the economic collapse of 2008-2009 gave “financial innovation” a bad name, because the online banking and payments sector could actually use a lot more of it. When’s the last time your bank’s website surprised you with a cool new feature or service? For that matter, when’s the last time PayPal rolled out any fundamentally new features or user-interface improvements? Once financial organizations grow to a certain size, it seems, they often stop dreaming about cool new ways to serve customers better.

But that actually turns out to be a good thing for startup entrepreneurs, who have been busy filling the gaps in online money management with services like Mint, acquired by Intuit last fall, and now WePay.

The Palo Alto, CA-based startup emerged last fall from investor Paul Graham’s Y Combinator startup school, with a plan to change the way groups of people pay for things. Born in Boston from the world of its co-founders, recent Boston College alums Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico, it started out as a way to do things like collect frat house dues or pool contributions for a bachelor party. But it’s already grown into something much broader, with some customers using it to round up homeowners’ association payments and others using it to collect donations for humanitarian causes. Couples are even using WePay to set up funds for date expenses without having to take the more deeply fraught step of opening a joint bank account.

“What really made us say, ‘Wow, we should do this’ was my brother’s bachelor party,” says Aberman. “I was collecting a couple of hundred bucks per person from 14 people, and track who had paid what, and I realized that there was a very specific need that PayPal wasn’t addressing…They do a good job of helping people sell things online, but I don’t think they do a good job helping people collect money from other people, particularly in large groups.”

WePay, which opened to the general public in late March, provides the coordinators of group payments with online accounts separate from their personal bank accounts. They can spend the money in the accounts using WePay debit cards or by writing paper checks. All members of a group can monitor that account’s activity, ensuring transparency and accountability. The system can also be used to send group members automated reminders that payments are due—in other words, bills.

Opening an account with WePay is free. The startup makes money by charging groups a small transaction fee that’s added to each bill or deducted from each payment. That’s the same way PayPal profits, and it’s a sufficiently convincing business model to have attracted $1.65 million in funding from August Capital and a group of angel investors that includes PayPal alumni Max Levchin and Dave McClure, former Googler Paul Buchheit, Swipely founder Angus Davis, and “super-angel” Ron Conway.

John Chory, an attorney at Boston-based Wilmer Hale, was an early adviser to Aberman and Clerico, before they entered Y Combinator. He argues that it took a pair of twenty-somethings—members of the Facebook generation—to invent something like WePay. “Rich and Bill are two very smart and very motivated entrepreneurs who recognized a problem in their own life and set out to solve it with WePay,” says Chory. “They are representative of the next generation—tech-savvy people who stay connected with technology 24 hours a day and who are comfortable keeping their friends apprised of their activities. I have a feeling they will keep solving problems for many years to come.”

The 8-person startup is “aggressively hiring” software engineers to solve those problems, Aberman told me during a long phone conversation. I’ve excerpted the most interesting parts of that talk below.

Xconomy: How did you and Bill Clerico end up co-founding WePay, and what was your path into Y Combinator?

Rich Aberman: Bill and I went to school together at Boston College, both on the same scholarship, and ended up rooming together freshman year and again junior year. We started a business together in college selling taxi advertising in Hong Kong. I was interning there for a telecom company and Bill had a software internship at Goldman Sachs. It wasn’t really a scalable, disruptive business, but it gave us an opportunity to work together and fall in love with entrepreneurship. We could have run it really effectively, but we both decided to come back to school. We weren’t quite ready to drop out.

I came out to the Bay Area after graduation to work at a Web development and video production startup for about six months, then I applied to NYU Law School and got in on a full ride. I was supposed to matriculate in the fall of 2008. Bill took a job out of school with a boutique investment bank out in Waltham.

About a year after graduating, and a couple of months before law school was going to start, we started incubating this idea. Bill predicted the impending collapse of the …Next Page »

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at 415-796-3024, or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.

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