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As I read more and more about investing and ways I can get the most out of my money, I realize how much I don’t know. To some degree, that bothers me. I came across Investopedia a day or two ago, and have been casually browsing through it. Coming from an amateur investor, it appears to be a good resource for learning about investment alternatives, as well as recommendations. Here’s a good starting point: 20 investments every investor should know about. The hardest part is that this stuff is rather boring (to me, at least). But we’ll see how it goes…

Like a lot of people I’m sure, something I’m desperately lacking in the land of money management is a centralized place to manage everything. I tried the 60-day trial of Quicken, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I mean, in theory it was exactly what I was looking for; but it didn’t auto-sync with all of my accounts, which is a must-have for me to spend the money on it ($64). It was supposed to grab my investments, loan balances (car and school), banking info, etc, but it didn’t. My bank and zero-balance credit card updated automatically, but with a catch: ignored pending transactions. I’ve gotten used to the “available balance” from online banking, which does consider pending transactions. Plus, that’s what I match my check book register against. In the end, Quicken just didn’t work for me.

Wesabe just released a Firefox extension that looks pretty slick (watch the video). But I don’t feel comfortable enough trusting it with everything. I trust my banking site, but I have more confidence in a national bank than a free (and community-based?) service with not much to lose. Personally, I would not enjoy working on an application that links into banking software and deals with other money-related accounts. That’s right up there in the list of things that aren’t fun to worry about.

Maybe someday I’ll find a solution. Until then, I’ll keep using the 6 bookmarks in my “money” bookmark folder. Blah.