[zaphoyd]

I firmly agree with Marc on the issue that to be truly effective personal finance requires people to work more closely with their data. I have been working on a web project of my own for my own personal finance use, as neither Mint, Wesabe, or other web based product do what I needed. The most common response from people I show it to is that it looks really helpful but that they don't have the discipline to organize their finances enough to be useful.

Mint definitely got the "no user thought required" down and this path has brought them [some] financial success. Is their overly simplified view of a complex process actually useful? The consensus for mass market web based personal finance systems so far seems to be

- Users don't care about privacy.

- Users don't care about data accuracy

- Users don't care about digging into their data at all.

- Users will pay for pretty graphs/charts with questionably-useful automatic analysis that is unlikely to make a significant difference in their financial situation.

What is the best thing to do in this case? Just give users what they want? Sell illusions because reality is too hard to deal with? I know there are some people who do care, how do you find them?