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A Tangled Financial Web
Making Sense out of Online Money-management Tools
By Jenn Director Knudsen
(For Dummies, 2002). This key feature helps people visualize everything – all at once and all in one place – so that each account, transaction and earning is connected to the entire financial puzzle. 
Creating and following a budget can be a great way for families to learn where they are spending their money and make decisions on where to cut costs.
At popular sites like Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money, there are online budget-tracking tools. Customers go through a registration process that includes inputting credit card and other personal information and supplying a username and password. The sites do daily updates for you, and users can set up categories of expenditures, such as clothing, groceries and entertainment, "to get a relative feel for where [your] money is going," Taschetta says.
People quickly learn where their dollars are really off to and where they're not. Amy Talley, mother of a 14-month-old daughter, says using budget-tracking software was very eye opening and important to her family's bottom line.
"It really became apparent that we would have to cut back on eating out/ordering in as much," says Talley, a mom from Burke, Va. "We knew we were spending more than we should, but it wasn't until I added it up that I knew how much it really was."
Other features in cyberspace for budget-minded parents are goal-planning tools, which allow the user to manage and view investments, such as stocks, 401Ks, 529 plans and CDs in one location.
Companies like Fidelity offer goal-planning software where parents can do scenario planning and learn how to adjust their portfolio to – hopefully – ensure they'll have enough money to send Junior to an Ivy League school and comfortably retire at a certain age.
Even the federal government is in on catering to parents – of all income levels – and their desire to invest. Since May 2003, the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt
