Do you want to find out where your money is going? Or what is eating up your money and possibly finding ways to curtail your expenses and manage your funds better using Budget and Money Management Apps?
There are lots of Budget and Money Management Apps you can use to save money and manage your bills as well.
The 7 Best Budget Apps for 2021 – NerdWallet
https://www.nerdwallet.com › Personal Finance
The best budget apps · PocketGuard, for a simplified budgeting snapshot · Mint, for budgeting and credit monitoring · YNAB and EveryDollar, for …
The 6 Best Budgeting Apps of 2021 – Investopedia
https://www.investopedia.com › … › Budgeting
Best Overall: You Need a Budget (YNAB) · Best Free Budgeting App: Mint · Best for Cash Flow: Simplifi by Quicken · Best for Overspenders: …
Best Budgeting Apps Of November 2021 – Forbes
https://www.forbes.com › advisor › banking › best-bud…
Best Budgeting Apps Of November 2021 · Personal Capital · Mint · YNAB (You Need A Budget) · PocketGuard · Goodbudget · Stash · Honeydue · Digit …
Best Budgeting Apps of November 2021 – CNBC
https://www.cnbc.com › select › best-budgeting-apps
Best budgeting apps · Best overall free app: Mint · Best app for serious budgeters: You Need a Budget (YNAB) · Best app for over-spenders: PocketGuard · Best app …
What Are the Best Budgeting Apps of November 2021?
https://www.businessinsider.com › … › Savings
Best budgeting app overall. Why it stands out: The Mint app is owned by Intuit, the financial software company that also owns TurboTax and …
The best budget apps of 2021 | CNN | CNN Underscored
https://www.cnn.com › 2021/10/21 › best-budget-ap
If you’re looking for a simple budgeting app for you and your significant other, look no further than Honeydue. This entirely free app is as …
Below are the best Budget and Money Management Apps:
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Mint / Budget and Money Management Apps
This app, from the makers of the e-filing site/software TurboTax, helps you get a clear picture of all your finances in one place. Once you sign up, you connect all your bank accounts, investment accounts, and credit card accounts, and Mint provides an overview of activity and balances across all of them, including graphs that break down your spending into categories. Your info is synced across the desk and mobile app, so you can get the most up-to-date view of your account balances no matter which platform you’re on.
Beyond displaying all your relevant financial info in one place, the Mint app helps you manage your money by providing budgets based on your spending and by providing your credit score for free. You also get reminders for upcoming bill due to dates, and can even pay your bills directly from the app on your phone and on the desktop.
Of course, you may be reluctant to hand over all of your financial account information to the Mint app, but the service does use security measures like multi-factor authentication to keep your information safe. Additionally, Mint uses multi-layered hardware and software encryption to keep all your login info for various financial accounts safe.
Best for: Budgeting, Managing bills, Getting a clear picture of your overall financial health, and Overall money management
Cost: Free
Platforms: Android, iOS, and Browser
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You Need a Budget (YNAB)
Using YNAB is just like paying a financial manager to help you manage your funds, only in this case, it’s an app. Many users describe it as efficient.
Once you sign up and connect all your financial accounts, YNAB helps you stay on track by helping you set goals and keeping you posted on how progress toward or away from those goals will affect your overall debt level. Like other apps in this article, You Need a Budget also breaks down your spending into charts and graphs, letting you see how much you spend on groceries, home, “just for fun” and more.
YNAB’s budgeting philosophy is that you need to give every dollar you have a job and put it to work for you by prioritizing where your money should go. Then You Need a Budget desktop site includes several resources to help you learn more about how to reduce your debt, such as weekly videos, online classes, podcasts, and more.
Cost: $4.17 per month, billed annually at $50. Note that the service does include a money-back guarantee if you don’t feel like it’s working for you, and you get a free 34-day trial as a new user.
Best for: Budgeting and Getting out of debt
Platforms: Android, iOS, and Browser
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Clarity Money
This is another solid app for overall money management, with the usual feature of tracking your spending across accounts. It offers a few unique tools as well, though, such as the ability to cancel unwanted online subscriptions (and to just see what subscriptions you have in the first place) with the goal of saving you money. It also identifies any bills you have that might be negotiable, and can automatically renegotiate for a lower rate on your behalf. Notably, you can also transfer money between your checking and savings accounts directly through the app.
If you have debt, Clarity Money will also provide suggestions on how to consolidate it with credit cards, and regardless of whether you have debt, the service will also suggest the best credit cards for you based on your financial situation and spending patterns.
Another unique feature: The app lets you set up a savings account that will automatically withdraw funds from a personal account. Overall, Clarity Money does seem to live up to the way it bills itself — as a consumer advocate — by offering plenty of unique, helpful tools. Note that as of publishing time, the app was not yet available for Android, but the company said it was coming to the platform in the future.
Cost: Free
Best for: Overall money management, saving money, and Cutting out wasteful spending
Platforms: iOS
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Acorns
This app has the tagline “invest spare change,” and it helps you by doing just that. To get started, you connect all the cards and accounts you use to make purchases with the app, then you just spend as you normally would. The Acorns app will automatically round up your purchases to the nearest dollar, but rather than giving the merchant you did business with some extra money, it will invest that change in a portfolio of more than 7,000 stocks and bonds. The idea is that over time, the small amounts of money you invest from rounding up an amount to something substantial.
In addition to investing spare change by rounding up your transactions to the nearest dollar, you can set up recurring investments of a specific dollar amount with Acorns. This can be on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can withdraw money from your account at any time without any charge, and the app automatically re-invests your dividends for you.
The Acorns app protects your data with 256-bit encryption, and you’re protected for up to $500,000 against fraud, so you can feel relatively secure while using this unique savings/investing app.
Cost: $1 per month (accounts of $5,000 or more pay 0.25% per year, while college students with a valid .edu email address get the Acorns app for free)
Best for Saving, Getting into investing, and Making the most of all your transactions
Platforms: Android, iOS, and Browser
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Goodbudget
If you’re familiar with the envelope budgeting method — which basically entails separating the money for different categories of your budget into separate envelopes — the strategy used by the Goodbudget app will make sense to you. Basically, you specify certain amounts of money to go toward various expense categories, and the Goodbudget app tracks your progress and how much you stick to these predetermined amounts.
The app lets you check how much you have left to spend within any given “envelope,” and it can also track your bank balances in addition to your balances across expense categories. Another helpful feature is the selection of reports the Goodbudget app can generate, including income vs. spending by envelope and more. You can even download transactions as CSV (spreadsheet) files from the web. Naturally, all the app’s info is synced between your phone and the desktop. So you’ll see the most up-to-date info across platforms.
You can share budgets with others such as family members. This is especially useful if you’re most concerned about staying on top of household expenses.
Cost: Free, though a Goodbudget Plus premium version is available for $6 a month or $50 a year. This paid version of the app includes unlimited envelopes (the free app limits you to 10), unlimited transaction history. An unlimited number of devices. And access to email support rather than just community support.
Best for Creating and sticking to a budget
Platforms: Android, iOS, and Desktop
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Qapital
If you want help saving for a particular goal, Qapital is a good option. You start by specifying a goal, such as a vacation or paying off student loans, and the app helps you set up automatic rules that can assist you in reaching that goal. You can customize the process by creating your own rules based on your personal situation, as well.
Once you get started with Qapital, you also get a checking account and a debit card that tie into the service’s savings program. So Qapital can essentially function as your bank, with the ability to transfer money between accounts. Paychecks and more, and with no monthly fees.
Cost: Free
Best for: Saving with a specific goal in mind and Automating your saving process
Platforms: Android and iOS
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Budget
The Budget app takes a dynamic approach to help you plan out how much you can safely spend on various things, and it manages to keep things pretty simple as well. You just enter in your various daily and monthly expenses along with your income. And Budgt will calculate how much you can spend each day.
Because you likely will go above that specified amount on some days. Budgt also delivers updated budgets based on your spending throughout the month, with the goal of keeping you in check so you don’t end up losing money when you were planning on saving money during the month.
You get some neat insights when you use the app over time. Such as info on the days when you’re most likely to spend the most money and projections about how much money will be left at the end of the month. You can export your monthly data as a CSV file.
This is one of the more specific apps featured in this article, as it doesn’t offer as wide a range of features as other apps such as Mint. As such, Budget’s probably best used in conjunction with a broader money-management app so you can accomplish various financial goals.
Best for:
Those with smaller incomes
Budgeting in general but specifically budgeting on a day-to-day basis
Cost: $1.99
Platforms: iOS.
