This is the followup to our interview with Thrive CEO and Founder, Avi Karnani and Lead Scientist, Matt Wallaert. In our first installment, which you can read here, we talked to them about their work in financial literacy, competition with popular money management site, Mint and how they differ from other financial service companies. In this installment, we’ll find out more on behavioral budgeting and how it works, and how Thrive is working to make banking a better service industry.

We recently sat down with Thrive (a free online personal finance manager) co-founder, Avi Karnani and Lead Scientist, Matt Wallaert to talk about Thrive’s offering to the rapidly evolving world of personal finance. Since we covered a lot of ground, we’re going to publish this interview in two parts: the first of which is below.

After moving to New York City four years ago, I fell into the common trap of feeling like I could participate in the city’s extravagance the way the rich and the coddled enjoy the city. Like many others that have traveled the road before me, I had to learn the hard way that I, unlike the numerous trust fund babies and bankers, did not have a Get Free pass into the city’s limitless playground for the wealthy. Once that realization sank in and I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I was able to settle in and enjoy the real New York City. That is, the one without all the flavor of the month restaurants with their $20 cocktails and over-obsessed neophytes.

One major holiday down, one to go. We hope all of you LifeStyler readers had a fantastic Thanksgiving Holiday (and long weekend), complete with home cooked meals and family gatherings. Ours consisted of alternately inhaling baked macaroni and candied yams while watching old Twilight Zone re-runs on the tube. But then we got down to business and compiled our favorite posts from the month of November in our monthly mashup of cheap, thrifty, and fabulous articles from LifeStyler and beyond the blogosphere. Keep reading for our November Editor’s Picks.

I’ve said it plenty of times before, and I’ll reiterate it again: Americans have a serious lack of budgeting skills. That’s why I was thrilled when On The Money put up a special budgeting calculator that breaks your monthly take-home income down into down into expense categories that are based on rule-of-thumb expense allocation.

Quicken — the guys behind some of the most popular finance tools in the home and workplace today — has finally learned from the Internet start-ups what the people want: Free Personal Finance Management. And they’ve launched Quicken Online to feed the starving masses.

The art of saving money has become somewhat extinct for Gen Y. As young adults exploring new careers and wanting to lead “adult social lives”, there’s a big discrepancy between our earnings as a young employee and the way we perceive that we should be living – usually way above our means.

Budgeting is one of those rare art forms that a lot of people never learn how to master. And although vital to managing your money (or lack thereof), it’s become something of a lost relic when it comes to younger generations understanding and practicing budgeting at an early age.