iSpend Facebook Application

What is the iSpend Facebook Application?

iSpendhelps you keep track and hold you accountable for the money you spend. How much you spend and where you spend you money is displayed on Facebook profile. A funny feature is that it takes the amount of money you spent and shows how many rolls of toilet paper you could have bought.

iSpend Pros

• Easily keep track of your spending right from your profile page
• Keep yourself accountable
• Funny toilet paper feature

iSpend Cons

• Having to invite your friends before you use it
• It would be cool if we could pick what the “how many rolls of toilet paper I could have bought” was. I’d like to put “how much I could have invested,” or “how much could have gone to rent”

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Lending Club Facebook Application

What is the LendingClub Facebook Application?

LendingClub allows you to give and receive loans from other Facebook users at reasonable interest rates. Rates for peer-to-peer borrowing and lending start at 7.45% APR. Depending on the borrower’s credit history, rates can go up to 11.68%.

When you sign up as either a borrower or lender, LendingClub verifies your identities and bank accounts. If you’re a borrower, you’ll receive a credit check to determine your interest rate. The crappier your history, the higher the rate you’ll receive.

LendingClub Pros

• Get reasonable loan rates
• You can make some money by being a lender.
• Sign up is easy.

LendingClub Cons

• Can only get a loan if you have a FICO score of 640 or higher. This is a con depending how you look at it. For a lender it’s great, because you can be assured that you don’t have any bum debtors. For a borrower it sucks, because it might take getting a loan from lending club out of the picture.
• Only available for US citizens. Because of different regulations in different countries, LendingClub is only available in the US. However, it looks like it will be open to Canada soon.

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BillMonk Facebook Application

What is the BillMonk Facebook App?

BillMonk allows you to easily keep track of shared expenses or IOUs with your friends. BillMonk has a nice clean interface and it’s not confusing at all to use. You choose either to create a new loan, new shared bill, or report a payment. When you create a new shared bill, you can select which friends participated in the bill, how much you paid, and how much your friend has to pay. BillMonk then sends your Facebook friend a message and displays the figures on the canvas page so you can see. BillMonk allows you to tag different payments and make comments about different bills. So, now you can take passive aggressivism to the net.

BillMonk also creates a widget to put on your profile so your friends who are using BillMonk can create new debts, shared bills, or report a payment with you right from your profile.

BillMonk is sort of similar to Buxfer. The only difference I found is that Buxfer also tracks your personal transactions.

BillMonk Pros

• Nice, simple layout
• Very user friendly
• Keep track of loans and shared expenses easily
• Don’t need to have a BillMonk account to use

BillMonk Cons

• It’s one trick pony. It only does bills and shared expenses. I would enjoy using BillMonk’s simple interface to keep track of my personal expenses. However, what BillMonk does, it does well. So, it can be forgiven.
• Doesn’t display who owes you what on your profile. I think showing who owes you money right on Facebook profile for all the world to see would be an awesome motivation for your friends to pay up. Guilt and shame have motivated humanity for centuries. Cruel? Yes, but so is not paying your half of the rent.

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Stocks Facebook App

What is the Stocks Facebook App?

The Stocks app was developed by Forbes.com. With the Stocks app, you can easily track the stocks you’ve invested in right from Facebook. The app allows you to track up to ten different companies. In addition to tracking your stocks performance, the Stocks app has a feed of the most recent news about your companies. In addition to keeping track of your own stock, you can also track your friends’ stocks.

Stocks App Pros

• Good integration with Facebook
• Takes advantage of social network by allowing you to see what others have invested in.

Stocks Cons

• Limited to the number of stocks you can track. What if you have more than 10 stocks in your portfolio?

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Buxfer Facebook App

What is the Buxfer Facebook Application?

Buxfer allows you to easily keep track of the money you owed friends and the money you borrowed from them. It also allows you to easily keep track of shared expense like rent and utilities among roommates. Whenever money is due, you can send them an e-mail or short message telling them to pay up.

The Buxfer app also allows you to create groups. Say if you have an organization that you collect dues for; just create a group for that organization on Buxfer and start tracking who owes and who has paid.

In addition of keeping track of shared expenses, you can also keep track of your personal expenses with Buxfer. Buxfer was developed by Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe.

Buxfer App Pros

• Easily keep track of shared expenses, IOUs, and personal expenses within Facebook
• Avoid confrontation with dead beat roommates
• Uses Facebooks social network by allowing you to see what your friends have paid and what they owe. You can also tag transactions that can be seen by other Buxfer users.

Buxfer Cons

• I haven’t seen any yet. This looks like a pretty cool app

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Online Bargains Facebook Application

What is the Online Bargains Facebook Application?

Online Bargains is a simple RSS feed that displays a box with the latest deals on the left column of your profile page. The RSS feed comes from CheapCheapCheap.org. Whenever you click on a link in the app, it takes you to CheapCheapCheap.org. From there you can make the purchase. Each link consist of ranking from 1 to 5, 1 being a crappy deal and 5 being a good one.

Online Bargains Pros

• Find out the latest deals right from your Facebook profile
• Some of the deals are actually pretty good. You can save some money.

Online Bargains Cons

• Do we really need this app? I already use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. I think it would be more convenient subscribe to CheapCheapCheap’s RSS feed through there.
• No real social leveraging. Apart from the ranking, the Online Bargains app doesn’t take full advantage of Facebook’s social networking. It would be nice if Facebook users can submit deals to be listed.

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Pay Me Facebook Application

What is the Pay Me Facebook Application?

The Pay Me app places a small text box on your profile page that allows your friends to type in an amount of money to transfer to you through PayPal. I’m interested to see how Facebook users will use this app. Will we see the proliferation of Facebook cyberbegging? Or perhaps it will be used to fund Facebook groups?

Pay Me Pros

• Nicely integrated with Facebook
• Make quick transactions while in Facebook
• Uses secure transaction system of PayPal

Pay Me Con

• No one sends me money, so right now, it’s pretty useless for me.

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CashBack Facebook Application

What is the CashBack Facebook Application?

CashBack is an amazing money saving application. Not only can you easily find good deals on products you commonly buy, CashBack actually pays you a percentage of the product price if buy a product with one of their merchants. So, not only do you start off with a good deal, you get some of your money back as well. The list of partnered merchants aren’t small fries either. It includes Blockbusters, iTunes, and Amazon. When you install the app, links show up in your left hand column of your profile page listing all the top CashBack Deals. In order to get the deal, you just have to click on it.

If you want to receive a check in the mail, you will have to provide some personal info, but this is all done on a secure server, so you shouldn’t have any worries

CashBack takes advantage of Facebook’s social network by allowing users to submit deals they’ve seen on the internet. By leveraging the “hive mind” of Facebook, CashBack users can be assured they know about the most recent and best deals.

CashBack Pros

• Save money in two ways: 1) get an initial good deal and 2) get paid for purchasing.
• Easy to use. There isn’t a multi step install process that some apps have.
• Leverages Facebook’s social network by allowing users to submit deals.

CashBack Cons

• Not many users… yet. As of this writing there are only 130 CashBack users. Consequently, the amount of user submitted deals will be low. As more people start using this app and submitting deals, the list of available deals will increase.
• No payment for submitting deals. I think a cool feature would be if you get a percentage of the sell price if you submitted a deal. I don’t know if this would be feasible, but I definitely think it would encourage more people to use it.
• No “Best Submitter” ranking. I think another nice addition would be showing who’s submitted the most as well as a ranking for the best submissions. It would be like a reputation system. If one person has a reputation of always submitting good deals, I want to see what he’s submitting. If another submits crap deals, I want to avoid reading his submissions.

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