5 Money Management Apps You Need For Your Personal Finance

Managing your personal finances can be overwhelming. But then personal finance is an essential aspect of your life that you cannot afford to overlook, else you will run the risk of financial insecurities. For most people, saving money is harder than making it. So whether you earn much or little to get you by, it is important to know how your money is being spent.

Tracking your spending is the first step to controlling your personal finances and nowadays you can’t do that on a piece of paper. Neither can you balance a chequebook, do people still use that?

Thanks to technology, there are personal finance apps that can connect with your bank account and monitor your spendings and help you save and plan for the future. A personal finance app is an app that you can download on your smartphone or tablet that helps you manage all aspects of your personal finances.

Here are five apps to help you manage your money:

Mint (free, available on android/iOS)

Mint remains the most popular budgeting website and app you’ll find for managing personal finances. With a simple interface and user-friendly tools, users are offered a complete financial picture in one place. With Mint, you can create a budget you can easily stick to and keep track of your bills. The app also records your spendings – where all your money goes – and categorises them when you link your cards to your account. Mint also helps you stay focused on your financial goals by improving your spending habits. 

Personal Capital (free, available on android/iOS)

Personal Capital is a wealth investment app that helps you to invest to reach your financial goals while tracking your cash flow. With tools to help you budget your wealth and investments such as Budgeting, Cash Flow Analyser, Net Worth Calculator, Investment Checkup, the app manages your spending and cash flow by showing monthly summaries that track where your money is going; manages your income and expenses from various financial accounts you’ve incorporated into the platform; helps track your liabilities and assets to show you your total net worth and helps you optimise your investments after you aggregate all your investment accounts into the platform.
All these tools are available on the free version of the app.

You Need a Budget (free for 34 days. Then $83.99/year, available on android/iOS)

YNAB is a budgeting app that teaches you how to prioritise and plan your spendings. With YNAB’s four rules -Give Every Dollar a Job, Embrace Your True Expenses, Roll With The Punches, and Age Your Money – you get your current money to work for you, consistently save for your monthly expenses, spend your money on what’s actually important to you, ensure you stick to your budget, break the paycheck to paycheck cycle and altogether gain control of your money. 

According to YNAB, the average person saves $600 in the first two months and $6,000 in the first year when people put these four rules into practice.

Wallet (free, available on android/iOS)

Wallet is a money management app built to help you save money, plan for the future, and see all your finances in one place. The app has three main sections to help you understand your financial data. Accounts is where you see the breakdown of your spendings across all accounts, including debit and credit spendings. Wallets Now shows you a simplified version of your accounts, plus a list of all your bank connections. Statistics is where you’ll find easy-to-understand graphs and financial overviews give you actionable insights about the state of your finances, across accounts, credit and debit cards, debts and cash.

Goodbudget (free, available on android/iOS)

Goodbudget is a budgeting service that helps you log and allocate your finances. With Goodbudget’s envelope budgeting system, you get to put your income in envelopes where the cash for each month’s expenses like groceries, eating out, debt payoff, and kids are taken out and divided into envelopes for each budget category. Spend from the envelope where you take money out of a designated envelope to spend for its specified expense and you can plan your spending beforehand and only spend what you have when you stop spending and see how much you saved.

Goodbudget helps you to stick to your budget limits without the hassle of keeping actual cash in physical envelopes. 

With any of these finance apps, you will find it easy to keep track of your finances on the go.

***

Featured image: istockphoto

***

Read More Personal/Self Development articles below.