If you’ve ever wanted to take control of your personal finance, it’s a great time to harness all that technology at your fingertips. You may be more familiar with the apps for posting, snapping, sharing, or tweeting; but there’s dozens of apps out there dedicated to improving your financial situation. Whether it’s credit repair, debt control, tracking spending, or investing, there’s an app for it.
Spending Habits
Understanding your finances typically begins with seeing where your money is going. Apps like DollarBird and Goodbudget are both well-known for tracking spending habits. Unfortunately, they’re being surpassed by apps that link directly to your accounts. Apps like Mint and BillGuard track your spending in the background without any manual inputs needed.
Investing/Saving
Once you understand where your money is going, it gets easier to redirect some of those dollar bills into investment opportunities. Acorns tops most investment apps by reinventing the stock market. Users can easily invest spare change in traditional stocks, an approach known as micro-investing.
The best thing about using finance apps is getting easy-to-use access to up-and-coming technology like cryptocurrency. Skraps has adapted Acorns’ style of micro-investing, but instead of traditional stocks, users get to invest spare change in top performing crypto coins.
Interested in some good ol’ fashioned saving? Digit is another app that, rather than investing, users can save money for different events or goals. Saving up for a vacation? Digit helps set aside the perfect amount of money by tracking your income, your expected expenses, and the goals you’ve set.
Budgeting
There’s dozens of budgeting apps on the App Store for both IOS and Android. There’s also dozens of reasons people choose to budget. Whether it’s to save money, pay off debt, or to simply control spending, budgeting apps can help with it all.
Mint is one of the most popular budgeting apps. You have the ability to track your spending, plan your bills, and even check your credit score within the app.
PocketGuard is a great tool to prevent you from breaking your budget. By tracking your spending, cross-referencing it to your allotted budget, PocketGuard even points out potential places to save more money on your current bills and spending habits.
You Need a Budget apparently has a die-hard follower base, coining the app YNAB for short. YNAB relies on the idea of accounting for every dollar you make. By inputing your income, you have to assign every penny to it’s designated category. If you have trouble tracking your spending, this app may be worth a shot.
Whatever your reasons for taking control of your finances, these apps make it a lot easier. It’s time to use that smartphone for more than just scrolling.
