Help me introduce iCal to my bills

May 16, 2008 2:44 PM

Do any of the new breed of financial websites like Wesabe, Mint, Yodlee et al. offer an iCal-subscribable calendar of your bills' due dates? Or do you have an idea for how to achieve this easily?

It would be great if I could subscribe to an automatically generated iCal calendar of all the upcoming due dates for my various bills. Some of the dates move around as months wear on, so setting up my own recurring events wouldn't work very well for me due to the maintenance hassle. That's kind of what I was already doing and I'm fed up with it. Mint will email and/or text me a week before a bill is due, but I'd really prefer an iCal pull kind of thing to these push-notifications.

posted by evariste to work & money (5 comments total)

Yodlee *emails* me near due dates -- but doesn't offer ical files (afaik).

I load all of mine manually into Google calendar, which meets your goal.
posted by SirStan at 6:12 PM on May 16

Yeah, I already get emails and texts from Mint, and I already load mine manually into iCal...
posted by evariste at 9:49 PM on May 16

Does your reference to iCal imply that you're using a Mac? If so, this article on triggering Applescripts with Mail.app might give you a flash of inspiration. iCal is very scriptable...

(One idea: arrange all your alerts to come n days before the due date. Then tell Mail to run a script to create an event n days from today. I don't have Mint set up to email me about reminders, so I don't know their format, but you might be able to pass the subject line to iCal if it tells you what the bill in question is.)
posted by electric_counterpoint at 10:09 PM on May 16

Cool! A MeFite who is one of the founders of Wesabe got in touch to say he thinks it's a great idea, and while he makes no promises, he's looking into it.

Incidentally, an interesting little tidbit: Mint uses Yodlee on the backend to fetch, among other things, your billing dates.
posted by evariste at 4:41 PM on May 19

electric_counterpoint, while your answer isn't exactly what I want, it does get me closer to what I want, so I'm marking it "best". Thanks!
posted by evariste at 4:42 PM on May 19