Best Budgeting Apps
- Mint: Best Money Management App
- You Need a Budget: Best Debt App
- Wally: Best Tracking Expenses App
- Acorns: Best App for Easy Saving
- Tycoon: Best App for Freelancers
TAKEAWAYS
- Budgeting apps include Mint, which is used to create a budget and track expenditures.
- You need a budget (YNAB) to help you budget every dollar you have.
- Wally monitors your expenses by enabling you to take a screenshot of your receipts.
- Acorns rounds up each cost to the next highest dollar and spends the difference.
- Tycoon is a popular freelancer app.
Best Debt App: You need to have a budget
- You Need a Budget (YNAB) is different from any other budgeting software you've used before. YNAB lets you avoid living a paycheck to pay off, pay off your mortgage, and "throw the punches" if anything unforeseen pops up. It's built on a relatively basic principle: every dollar has a job in your personal budget, whether it's for savings, debt repayment, or living expenses.
- You can try the app for 34 days and sign up for one of two options, including a monthly plan of $11.99 per month or an annual plan of $84 per year.7 You can use the service on your iPhone, Android device or on your desktop.
- Special features: not only can you set up weekly / monthly budgets (all personal finance apps do that), but you can also set up budgets for individual projects, such as Christmas gifts.
- This app is for you if: every other attempt you made to check your budget has left you frustrated and hopeless.
Best Tracking Expenses App: Wally
- Wally is a simple , elegant device that is incredibly handy and easy to use. Once, it's completely safe and you're not going to have to spend any money in fees. And the best part of it — the app doesn't promise any ads. It's a perfect choice if you want more insight into where your money is heading.
- Special features: You can take a photo of your receipts instead of entering the numbers manually. Less clicking is equivalent to fewer, fat-fingered errors.
- This app is for you if: your previous attempts to track costs have been abandoned within a month because you hated entering them.
Best Simple Saving App: Acorns
- Acorns put your pocket change to work in a completely painless way. Users say that they never notice the difference. Wouldn't you like to see an additional $300 or $500 or even $1,500 in your savings account every year?
- According to the website, there are more than 7 million users (as of Feb. 2020). The company says it takes about five minutes to log in and start saving.
- Special features: You can set up your Acorns app to automatically invest your savings without realizing it.
- This app is for you if: you never owned a share of the stock because you didn't think you had enough money to invest.
Best Freelancer App: Tycoon
- Special features: The Tycoon App is geared to the unique needs of freelancers, such as the measurement of take-home pay (minus taxes and agent commission) so that you can determine whether or not to accept a job.
- This app is for you if: you want to determine if it's worth taking a job. Time is money, after all.
- Tycoon was founded by a supermodel named Jess Perez, whose portfolio includes a swimsuit for Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated. Perez noted that models, like many freelancers, have often been paid very late for their work, sometimes months or even years after the contractually agreed payment date. And it's hard for freelancers to keep track of multiple projects , especially because they're typically in the middle of one when the other comes in.
