Getting your personal finances in order will not only allow you to reach your financial goals but will make you a happier person as well. Indeed, a money survey listed on CNBC found that 9 in 10 adults say that “nothing makes them happier” than having their finances sorted out, which you can achieve by improving your money habits. One way to do this is to find the right personal finance apps that can help you reach your goals. That said, here are some of them:
For Budgeting: You Need a Budget
You Need a Budget (YNAB) is a finance app that offers a more intentional way to budget your money. The YNAB allows you to assign every dollar in your income a “job” (such as bills, savings, and investments), ensuring that every penny is accounted for. This is all in accordance with the zero-based budgeting system, whose goal is for your income minus your expenditures to always equate to zero every month.
YNAB also offers extensive educational resources, such as guides and live 20-minute classes, that teach specific money topics like breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and creating a mortgage plan.
It requires a small fee of $84 per year, but reviews have attested to the usefulness of the app in getting their personal finances in check.
For Joint Finances: Goodbudget
Goodbudget uses an envelope-budgeting system — a method that divides your income into different expenditures, such as groceries and leisure. The rule is not to spend more than the money that’s inside the envelope. Goodbudget is mostly used by couples and parent-teen duos. Both of you decide how to budget your finances every month and separate them into envelopes. The app can’t connect bank accounts.
However, both parties can share the same Goodbudget profile and deduct the number of their purchases as they use the money. There’s even an early warning system when the app thinks the account is going to overspend.
For Savings: Chase Mobile
Chase is a financial firm, which offers a broad range of services from personal banking and auto financing to small business loans and mortgages. If you apply for an account, Chase Mobile helps you manage your finances affiliated with the firm.
Additionally, it has two unique features: “Today’s Snapshot” and the ability to create separate savings goals. “Today’s Snapshot” is a section of the app that lets you see your daily spending. It even tracks your spending habits by breaking down your monthly expenses into categories like food and entertainment.
The second feature lets you create folders like “Emergency Fund” and “New Coffee Maker” for each of your savings goals. You can then set up automatic money transfers for all of them, allowing you to reach your goals little by little.
For Credit Usage: Petal Card
Petal Card, also known as Petal on the App Store, is an app that encourages users to use their credit responsibly. For example, this lets you estimate how much interest you’ll owe before you consume your credit. It even allows you to set a credit budget to ensure that you never go overboard. Furthermore, Petal Card recently launched Leap, a program that allows users to receive rewards for meeting personal credit goals.
It tracks your VantageScore — a credit score developed by credit bureaus Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax — to determine how likely you are to repay borrowed money. The higher it is, the more perks you’ll receive from financial institutions, such as a credit limit increase or lowered interest rates.
For Investing: Personal Capital
If your financial goal is to invest enough money for retirement, or another reason, then you’re going to need a wealth management app. To this end, Personal Capital does the job well. While it’s primarily a budgeting tool like YNAB, it has a ton of other tools for investing.
With integrations from over 14,000 financial institutions globally, Personal Capital allows you to track your investment portfolios by account, asset class, or individual security. You can even include company-sponsored retirement plans if you’re enrolled in some. The analyzer may even suggest lower-cost allocations when certain markets are not doing so well.
Plus, Personal Capital is managed by a group of financial advisers. You can employ them to manage your assets for a monthly cost of at least 0.89%. The cost will depend on the size of your portfolio.
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Bottom Line
Managing your personal finance is a challenge, but the right apps can make the process easier. You just need to determine what your goals are. Is it to budget money? Build money for retirement? You can use a number of these finance apps simultaneously if you have more than one goal.
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