4 Free Budget & Personal Finance Apps To Simplify Your Life
We all know that one thing in life is way too easy to do: spend money.
Especially money that we don’t realize that we are spending. We go out to eat, shopping, or out to the movies. We just hand the cashier/waitress/etc. the money or swipe a card and it’s spent. Moreover, we can now go online and click on a simple button and buy things that are charged to our credit card. The advent of things like iTunes and Amazon allow us to buy things like apps, games, and music directly off of our smartphones as well. As there are ever more ways to spend money, needless to say, sometimes we take that spending TOO far. Oftentimes, farther than our paychecks stretch.
However, with that advent of spending comes allow you to open your eyes to your spending habits. This can help you determine how much you are saving versus how much you earn. It can help you determine what you have to spend in each category versus what you are actually spending. It can help you cut down in some areas, beef up in others, or help boost savings overall. Below are some of the best ones to help you track your spending:
Wally — iOS
Wally is best known for its swift interface and user-friendly features. It touts itself as one of the easiest ways to help with budgets, expense tracking, goal savings, and income as well. Wally takes the tedious book-balancing out of the equation, and provides a GPS tracker to help you determine where you visit most frequently and where you spend the most money. You just have to have your “location” as accessible to your app so it can determine where you are and where you go often.
Wally also stores stuff right on your mobile device, not on the internet so hackers can’t get into the information by getting into your internet history. Unless you lose the phone that your information is safely stored on. Wally also can send alerts for big purchases and notify you if any purchases are made that are out of sync with your general spending habits. The only downside to Wally is that you can’t share the data with other people like your parents, spouse, family, or other people with smartphones.
Toshl Finance — iOS, Android
The odd little cartoon character on the front of the Toshl app provides financial tips and money-saving motivational sayings/quotes to help ensure that you are on track towards your spending, savings, and budget goals. It helps you be reminded of those goals every time you log onto the app to view your spending, savings, and statuses of your accounts.
Besides being infatuated with the strange characters on the app, Toshl can track income and expenses and reminds you of tracked expenses if you set repeating events every-so-often to ensure that you are paying all your expenses on time to avoid late or maintenance fees that come with being late. You have to create an account at Toshl.com, and then you can store your data in their cloud. The only problem is if you feel their cloud is not secure, this app may not be for everyone as users must trust the cloud and that their information is protected!
Far as budgeting features and tools offered to clients it’s the middle of the road far as Toshl is concerned. It’s also a cloud-based app so sometimes if you fear things getting hacked, then you may not want to store personal banking/financial information in company’s cloud that may otherwise not be completely safe as you would like it to be. Toshl has its perks and its downfalls.
Mint — iOS, Android
With over 10 million users worldwide, Inuit’s Mint is the leading budget tool on the mobile device today. Mint tracks income into your bank account (i.e. paychecks, royalties, interest, gifts, etc.) by adding up all the deposits made into a specified account(s). It shows what you spend every time you withdraw cash or use your debit card to make a purchase. It tracks what you earn/make in a month versus what is spend/going out each month. It shows graphs comparing the earning and spending to see if you are spending less, the same, or more than you make. It shows your excess or deficit for each month. This allows you to determine if your earning and spending is on track, or if you need to make modifications to your spending to stay on budget.
The only problem with the app is that to track bank accounts, credit card, debit cards, and all expenses thoroughly the app requires your bank account and credit/debit card numbers, something not all people are entirely comfortable with putting into the application. If Mint were ever to get hacked, the information entered is not guaranteed to be in a safe space. These factors may make you think twice about using an app like Mint considering that any app can get hacked at some point. It’s something to consider before divulging personal information to an app stored on any electronic device like a smartphone.
Spendee — iOS, Android
Spendee touts itself as being simple and to the point. The app tracks the money that goes in and out of your pocket! That’s it! Nothing more and nothing less. Spendee has a simple interface that is easy to use, and the app is great for first-time budgeters as it eliminates the extras that seem get the first-timers lost. It allows you do the basics, be done with it, and move on to other things.
Spendee allows you to organize your budget into categories so you know what you are spending on what category. Enter what you spend in various categories such as bills, housing, grocery, travel, and hobbies versus what you are saving. The downside to that is that the categories are not customizable, so you can forget to add other categories or expenses in, or something may not quite fit a specific lifestyle that sees you spend a specific amount of money on something not included in one of these categories.
Spendee doesn’t require a third-party account, so all information is stored safely on the hard drive in your mobile phone, not in a cloud or on the internet where it is more susceptible to hacking.
How you choose to track your money is completely up to you. It’s just a matter of your phone now offering you more options than ever on how to track, budget, save, and spend your money. Choose which app fits your lifestyle best, and if none of these do there are others out there you can do research on to determine if those are a better fit. It’s all up to you. These are some of the most popular, however, and the ones we find the most useful. It will be up to your lifestyle and personal preferences as to what you find working best.
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