San FranciscoI had the pleasure of meeting some of the top personal finance bloggers (see acknowledgments below) this past Friday at a forum organized by the folks at NetworthIQ, Expensr and MyStrands who are teaming up to develop a personal finance tool for Web 2.0.

I’m a tough sell customer on everything, from products costing pennies to those reaching into thousands of dollars. A product needs to amaze me before I can loosen my death-grip on money. So, I was curious if there was something that could rival treasures such as a free expense tracker or an inexpensive budgeting tool.

The proposed financial tool under MyStrands would use the power of social networking to give you a snapshot of how your net worth and spending for certain categories compares to those of your peers. It’s a neat concept, but I didn’t find it exciting enough. Part of what has made me financially responsible is the ability to tune out what other people are doing with their money. But maybe I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater — maybe seeing that other people are saving or investing more than me would give me incentive to save or invest more myself. Or it would depress me. Who knows?

I did get excited about two other ideas that I thought could revolutionize personal finance tools. One idea would be easy to accomplish — the other — a holy grail pursuit.

1. Using Data for Recommendations– One of the MyStrands folks asked if we would use an online financial tool that made recommendations based on your own data entries.

For instance, let’s say your spending has changed because you recently finished college or other advanced education. The online financial tool can make the following suggestion: ‘œMost people who have finished school find increased spending in commuting costs. A money saving option at this point may be to consider enrolling in a commuter checks benefits program from your employer.’

The online financial tool could make other recommendations across phases of life, with events such as marriage, children, loss of job, retirement and so on.

I’m a complete sucker for recommendations. I generally like to keep my data private, but that’s nearly impossible to accomplish when doing business online. Recommendations are at least a good use of data that get collected from you that you didn’t want collected in the first place. Most often, recommendations from services like Amazon are actually worthwhile and interesting. Recommendations based on your expense tracking and cash inflows could be even more valuable.

2. Fun Personal Finance– Another question that came up is whether there is any way to make an online financial tool fun, funny or more engaging. A room full of PF bloggers agreed that whomever figures out how to do this will be very rich.

But what would make personal finance fun? And should it be funny? After all, our hard-earned money and savings are serious things. Who wants to listen to a clown tell us what to do about our livelihood? I’m personally torn about this. I’d love for more people to get involved with expense tracking and budgeting, and making it less painful would do the trick. I’m just not sure how it can be done.

Dear readers, what do you think? Are recommendations a good idea from an online financial tool that tracks your cash inflows and outflows?

And how could you make an online financial tool fun?

Acknowledgments:

Thanks again to the folks at NetworthIQ, Expensr, and MyStrands for hosting the event. It was a pleasure to meet the following:

J.D.- Get Rich Slowly
Jim- Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
Jeffrey- Saving Advice
SVB- Digerati Life
Flexo- Consumerism Commentary
Lazy Man- Lazy Man and Money
Sam- Getting Finances Done
Cap- Stop Buying Crap
James- DINK’s Financial Blog