Top 5 Family Budget Apps Chetna Jain December 22, 2020 Money 2546 If you need help managing your spending and getting your personal finances under control, a budgeting app may be just what you need. There are many financial management apps to choose from, each fighting to distinguish itself from the others. By the way, if you think you can only find budgeting apps and other software sold directly from their developers, you are wrong. You can only find these told sold at classified ad websites like Shoppok. Many applications are designed for financial management and accounting, but each has something unique to offer. One app specializes in personal money allocating tools, while another offers bill tracking. Some are focused on giving the ability to assign each dollar you have a job, creating a complete financial management system. Some provide a warning when you are close to spending outside your allotment. The number of wealth management, personal finance, and money-saving applications is large, so it helps to know which ones are built with the most users in mind while offering exclusive tools for those with unique needs. Family financial management can be overwhelming and stressful. But sometimes, it can be even more challenging to find help doing it. From new budgeters to those who love the old-fashioned envelope and listing system, there are multiple apps that will keep your wallet happy. Almost everyone wants to improve how they manage their personal finances, save, and allocate their money — and the technology world has taken notice by releasing a steady supply of financial management tools to lend a hand. We sifted through several saving applications and selected the most helpful ones. Whether you need an application that subscribes you to a specific wealth management method or one that simply tells when your bank account is drying-up, the solution is on the list below. Bonus: Many of these tools are free, and all are available on iOS and Android devices and some are available at Shoppok. 1. YNAB (You Need a Budget) YNAB is for serious users, no doubt. It’s based on the zero-based budgeting (like the zero inventory) system, and users must make a plan for every buck they earn. It also needs an investment of either $84 a year or $11.99 a month, after a 34-day free trial. Those who subscribe can benefit from YNAB’s huge selection of features. You can integrate other financial institutions like bank accounts, set goals, contribute to savings, and personalize your spending categories. The app is great for individuals or couples working together on their finances. It is available on both desktop and mobile platforms, options to integrate your bank accounts or enter expenses manually, and includes debt payments and goal tracking features to help motivate you to reach your financial goals. 1. Personal Capital Personal Capital’s free financial interface offers a huge selection of tools to track your finances. We like its money management platform because it automatically tracks all of your income and expenses. It divides spendings into categories and provides graphical representations to see where your money is going. Beyond cash flow, Personal Capital also monitors all of your investments. Once you link your retirement, savings, and other investment accounts, you can see your asset allocation and analyze the expense ratios of your mutual funds and exchange traded funds. The application features a retirement planning tool that you can personalize to your specific needs. With the app, you can trace your net worth, see your expected bills to pay, take a look at your budget, review your allocations, and analyze your current portfolio. The cash flow and financial management tools are not quite as sizable as other applications on this list, but they work just the same using similar automated tracking of spendings from linked accounts. 2. Good budget Previously known as Easy Envelope Budget Aid or EEBA, Goodbudget is the right financial tool option for couples that want to share their saving strategies together. It employs the familiar envelope financial management philosophy to power your bold budget for all of your payments, bills, and spending. Because you can share and sync allocations with budgeting partners across the iPhone and Android spectrum, it is great for couples and partners with shared finances, while working great for individual savers too. When you enter new transactions, you have the choice to add a number of details, breaking down your spendings into several envelopes. Budget by category (called envelopes in the tool) with up to 10 envelopes for free. Add to your envelopes from your income every payday and you’ll find out just how much you have leftover for non-essential spendings. 3. Mvelopes Financial management lends itself well to envelope saving, an old technique of budgeting where you put cash in different envelopes for different spending categories, and, when each envelope is empty, it means your spending for that category is done. This is a bit more challenging with credit and debit cards, but Mvelopes makes it easy to follow cash style allocations in a digital budgeting setting. While the tool is not free, Mvelopes provides the ability to connect to unlimited financial accounts and put traditional envelope budgeting to use to trace your day-to-day spending. With real-time budget matching, you will know whether you can afford to buy that pizza or need to wait for your budget to reset next month. 4. Mint Perhaps the most well-known tool in this list, Mint offers users the ability to create budgets, trace bills, and receive a free credit score. But it’s the budgeting tool where Mint shines the most. It asks you to integrate your bank, loan, and credit card accounts, and then uses information from those accounts to suggest budgets for you based on your spending, classifying them into categories such as “Travel,” “ETF”, “Entertainment” and “Shopping.” The best part? You’ll be able to project how much you can save by cutting back your spending in a category. At the end of August, Mint announced an app refresh with data-driven “MintSights.” Again, using your actual financial information, MintSights will provide personalized recommendations, from creating a first budget to debt consolidation to how to grow your investments. Unfortunately, Mint discontinued its bill pay option in June, so users are unable to pay their bills through Mint. However, they can still add their bills, track the due date and amount, and mark bills as paid. Unlike other apps, Mint is free to use, but it makes money by suggesting offers to its users, such as new credit cards or other investing apps. SHARE THIS POST