If you are just getting started, a budget is the best first step. Almost no one has unlimited income, so you want every dollar of your income to work for you. A budget can show you what is most important to you. Is paying off debt most important? Or saving up for a down payment for a house? If so, you may have to cut back on things like eating out or shopping in order to put that money towards the goals you have set. You get to tell the budget what to do!
So, what is the best budgeting app for you to use? Here is a review of some of my favorites:
EveryDollar-
EveryDollar from Ramsey Solutions has a free and premium option. Both options allow you to create a budget by inputting your income, bills, planned giving, planned spending, and planned debt payoff or savings. The free version allows you to manually input all of your transactions to track how much you have spent in each category of your budget. The premium option connects to your bank accounts and automatically updates your transactions for you to add to the various budget categories. The premium option also has helpful budgeting tools including Insights which will show you spending breakdown by category over time. My favorite part of EveryDollar is the “remaining” tab which shows you how much money you have left overall and in each budget category for the month.
Pricing: $17.99 per month or $79.99 per year
Get $10 off an annual plan (not a paid sponsorship)
Quicken Simplifi-
Quicken Simplifi is a great app for money nerds like me. It allows you to link all your accounts including investment accounts and tracks your net worth. It does not have an option for folks who do not want to link their bank accounts. When you first start using the app, you will spend some time setting up recurring bills and expenses and after that it will automatically link everything in future months. For the most part all your transactions are automatically allocated into the correct category for you, but there may be a few instances that you have to do manual changes to transactions for it to be accurate. As an example- your Walmart transaction is automatically assigned by the app to the shopping category, but you were at Walmart for groceries instead of shopping so you will have to manually change it over. It also allows you to split transactions allowing a portion of the transaction to go to shopping and a portion to groceries. Quicken Simplifi also has other features that I found very helpful like the “Watchlist” function that allows you to track spending in a specific category over time and for the month. It tells you how much you spend on average each month and what you are projected to spend based on your spending for the month so far. My favorite feature is the Total Spending feature which gives you a pie chart of your spending by category.
Other Apps:
Over the years I have also tried a few other budget apps including Mint (converted to Credit Karma), Budget App- Spending Tracker, Budget Planner App- Fleur, Buddy: Budget Planner App, Monarch: Budget & Track Money, Spending Tracker, and Spendee Money & Budget Planner. These and tons of other apps out there will give you a free trial to try out their services. Find one that makes sense to you and get started!
Add comment
Comments