Quicken Online offers helpful charts and graphs to manage your account.

It's a frustrating time to be an American consumer. Every time you turn around, it seems prices are going up — from gasoline to groceries.

With the buying power of your paycheck shrinking daily, you've got to make the most of your financial resources. And there's nothing more powerful than a computer to help.

For years, financial management software like Quicken has (for a price) offered a way to balance your checkbook while offering insight as to where all that money is going.

Now meet the next generation of Quicken: Quicken Online. For $3 a month ($36 a year), Quicken Online links up to more than 5,000 banks, credit card providers and other financial institutions, providing you with a consolidated, up-to-the-second look at your financial situation.

It uses charts and graphs to help you size up your spending patterns. Have you been out shopping for shoes a little too often? You'll instantly see the impact on your bottom line.

There are some important limitations of Quicken Online: You can't use it to pay bills or transfer funds from one account to another, and you can't filter the transactions to create customized reports (as you can with traditional Quicken).

But Quicken Online is easy to set up and use, and it is also smart enough to accurately and automatically categorize most transactions.

A 30-day free trial is available.

But the Quicken line of products, which has been handling finances in one form or another for nearly a quarter of a century, now has an interesting and worthy new online competitor.

Mint has easy-to-use graphs that break down your spending patterns.

Mint, like Quicken, can make a connection to thousands of financial institutions, importing and continuously updating your credit card purchases and other account information on the fly without the need to manually enter transactions.

Mint, however, seems a lot more polished, with added detail in its reporting tools.

For instance, it lets you anonymously compare your spending trends with others in the same city.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Mint and Quicken is that Mint is free. Mint says it makes its money by offering you financial services that can save you even more money — a win-win situation.

But is the convenience of the services offered by Mint and Quicken enough to override any well-founded reluctance you might have to submit your online account information to a third party for processing?

ClearCheckbook.com lets you categorize purchases and pre-set spending limits.

There's another online financial management option called ClearCheckbook.com. It doesn't need (or want) your usernames or passwords to banks and credit card companies because it doesn't automatically import data from your bank or other accounts.

Functionally, ClearCheckbook is more like the original Quicken — you just manually enter transactions from your checkbook at your computer, or from anywhere using instant messaging and even cell phone text messages. The information you input is available anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Like Mint, there is no charge to use ClearCheckbook.

I enjoyed testing and using these programs, which are all designed to run in your Web browser. But even though the providers offer assurances of security, I can't help thinking about how much of what I enter and view do is floating around out there — somewhere — as data that can potentially be intercepted by some clever person or evil organization.

For that reason, I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not endorsing any of these services, and I urge you to carefully read all the fine print if you elect to go forward.

Only you can decide whether the real benefits of these analysis tools outweigh any risk.

Watch Computer Corner every week on News 8 Midday at noon (usually seen on Wednesdays), or online any time.

E-mail askwalt@wfaa.com