This is a continuation of the Modern Money Managers series. See past posts on Mint and Microsoft Money.

I chose Wesabe as my Modern Money Manager for two reasons: 1. It's free. 2. My Spanish is just good enough to know that sabe is a conjugated form of the Spanish verb saber, which means "to know, to learn, to realize, or to find out."

So, I like to imagine that Wesabe was chosen as the name because it helps you find out where your money is going. And, in fact, that's exactly what Wesabe does. After you sign up, Wesabe lets you add your accounts (credit card, savings, checking, etc.), and aggregates them in one easy-to-use interface. Here are some features I found particularly helpful:

• All your "Spending vs Earnings" from various accounts are graphed on the Wesabe Dashboard (think homepage). This lets you quickly and easily see if your finances are in the red or the black.
• Individual transactions from your accounts can be tagged with descriptors you choose. For example, tag all grocery transactions as "groceries." Wesabe then adds up all purchases for that descriptor and displays the total on a pie graph on the Dashboard--along with all other tagged and untagged purchases--so you can see what piece of the pie is going where.
• For each tag, you can set a "Spending Target" that helps budget your spending on that type of item.
• You can join groups of like-minded "Wesabeans" to discuss money-management goals, struggles or issues and to get advice. It's a social networking tool just for money.

Anyway, check it out and get your budget on (here's the privacy policy in case you're interested in that kind of thing). One caveat, when I first started Wesabe, I had to upload my account information and it was kind of a pain.  The first several times I tried it didn't work, but eventually (after adding an upload tool to Firefox) I got it to process the information. It probably helps to read the "Uploading to Wesabe" instructions first--something I neglected to do.

--Jens