6 Best Personal Finance Apps
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Source: WealthSoup.com
Sometimes it can feel overwhelming trying to keep up with your finances. Luckily, there’s an app for that. Today mobile apps make budgeting, saving, and investing much more convenient. Here are the 6 best personal finance apps that you should be utilizing for your money.
1. Mint (Budgeting)
There are a lot of online budgeting apps out there, and different people have varying opinions on which one is best. For me, the clear winner is Mint. It links all your accounts in one place, updates quickly, lets you set your own budget categories and amounts, and the best part is that it adds your transactions automatically. I’ve written about WHY I use Mint and HOW I use Mint for our monthly budget.
2. Personal Capital (Tracking Net Worth)
Personal Capital has some similarities with Mint, where it pulls all your accounts and displays them in one place. You can also see your income and expenses. The biggest benefit with this app is that it’s extremely effective for tracking your investments and net worth. Your net worth is one of the most important financial figures, but sometimes can be difficult to calculate. The colorful graphs show the growth of your most important financial numbers over time, in a clean and easy to use display. If you’d like to get a more complete look at your financial picture, it would definitely be worth checking out Personal Capital.
3. Digit (Saving)
Have you ever told yourself you were going to start saving more money, but then at the end of the month you had none left to put into savings? This app is perfect for people who have trouble saving money, since it does it for you automatically. Digit reviews how much money is in your checking account, along with your typical spending habits, and then makes small deposits automatically into a linked savings account based on how much money it deems “you won’t miss.” The deposits tend to range from $5-50 and take place every few days. While you won’t earn any interest on the money in your Digit savings account, it helps you finally start saving and lets you do so without any additional effort. You can even make extra deposits or withdrawals via text message. While this app is fantastic for people who have trouble saving money, it’s not ideal for people looking to earn interest on their savings, people who want full control of their money, or who carry a very low balance in their checking account.
4. Acorns (Investing)
We all have the jar that we toss spare change into and sits in the same place forever. Now, you can put that spare change to work for you. Acorns rounds up each transaction you make to the next dollar, and then invests that difference automatically. It’s perfect for people who don’t have a lot of money to invest (no minimum amount required), or would like help getting started into the world of investing. The app analyzes your data, including age, goals, income, and time horizon, to recommend an investing strategy that’s right for you. This definitely wouldn’t be recommended for very large amounts of money, or as a primary method of investing, but can be an extremely useful tool.
5. RobinHood (Stock Trading)
RobinHood lets you invest in individual stocks, without paying the high commissions and trading fees found everywhere else. That’s right, it’s completely free! Like Acorns, there is no minimum amount required to get started, and it makes investing much simpler. They also have recently introduced RobinHood Instant, which gives you immediate access to your deposits and funds made from selling stocks, rather than having to wait the typical 3 days. This app is perfect for the active trader or the new stock investor.
6. Credit Karma (Credit Score)
Credit Karma’s main feature is that it gives you access to your ongoing credit score for free, and is updated weekly. This is very useful information for your financial picture, especially when it’s displayed and maintained so clearly. You can also access your full credit report within the app, with a category by category breakdown of how your score was calculated. There are numerous other tools within the app as well, including a credit simulator, various calculators, and an area to track your spending.
See the original post featured on DealsPlus: 6 Best Personal Finance Apps
What’s your favorite app that helps you manage your money better?
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