My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself?

The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.

Because this locks you into BoA. Hence why they're doing it.

If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards.

To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?

> Why would I want to do all this myself?

My bank doesn't have this, so that's one reason.

Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your bank's analysis tools, if they're great, fine whatever good for you. But for some people it'll have limitations one way or another. Competition is not a bad thing.

Besides, it can be fun to look at your financial data with your programming tools. It's an interesting data set to play around with, analysis, data visualization, budgeting, even if just for learning.

Used yodlee multiple banks and works perfect. Can do most of this spend reports and budget part of it.

I haven't used BofA for a while, but in general the problems I have with these features are 1) inaccurate classification and no way to fix it 2) exported data does not include all of this, so if I move banks or want to do analysis I'm sol

ymmv, of course

Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present.

The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...

So export the json from simple and build your own graphs, then.

Citi has a similar section, and it's crap. If it were programmable I could use a third-party version of it.

Isn't this one of those things where if you're conscientious enough to want to spend time sorting this out and building up an analysis you're probably already the kind of person that doesn't have completely wild and untracked spending habits?

I don't think so; I'm a counter-example for one. I've found that I just can't track my spending unaided and that I pretty much need to maintain my own books to stay on top of everything.

There's software like gnucash which will take care of that, without the need for the fancy bank account.