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Helpful financial apps for personal finance
Financial applications and programs can significantly help you in the financial planning process. Most financial apps run on desktop or laptop as well as through mobile apps, making it easier to make sure your bills get paid and that you can save money. See our video here.
Here are some widely used financial apps for personal finance:
Quicken
Quicken is a leading financial software that allows you to sync all your brokerage accounts and enables a smooth tracking of the performance of your investment portfolio. In addition, you can sync all your bank accounts, including your credit card, checking account, and savings accounts. In that way, you get a comprehensive picture of your financial situation, and you can keep up with your payments. You may also create a budget and set spending limits to ensure you are not overspending on your monthly bills and household expenses. On the downside, Quicken can only be used on your desktop, which means that you have to download it on a single computer at home, either on Windows or Mac. Nevertheless, Quicken is one of the best personal finance software for its user-friendly platform, budgeting features, and investment tools. It costs $35 per year for the starter version.
Morningstar
Morningstar is most useful for people who prefer value investing. The app offers an accurate rating for mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, and bonds, and its rating system is universally accepted by the investment community. By using the app, you can get an accurate analysis of your investment position using bull and bear recommendations and compare your investments with similar portfolios or benchmark indexes. One of the key advantages of Morningstar app for personal finance is the Portfolio X-Ray Tool, which offers information on the allocation of domestic and global mutual funds. This means that you can compare your asset allocation both on a domestic and global macro level and determine your portfolio risk. In the bottom line, Morningstar is the best financial app for value investors. So, if you favor technical analysis, Mornigstar is not for you.
YNAB – youneedabudget.com
YNAB (You Need a Budget) is a widely used personal finance application that can help you create a budget and track your expenses. The app uses advanced technology that connects to your bank accounts in order to be able to track your balances and retrieve any relevant information in real time. Furthermore, YNAB offers great tutorials and a lot of educational material. A possible drawback is that you may have trouble classifying the money spent on your credit cards because your bank may not authorize YNAB to have access to your accounts. However, this will probably be solved. All in all, YNAB is a reliable finance app that can help you keep your balances on track while learning the basic rules of budgeting and financial planning. YNAB costs $5 per month or $50 per year.
Daily Budget
Daily Budget is a great financial application that can help you stick to your budget and save money. Its user-friendly interface makes it very easy to use and allows you to set the frequency of your transactions, i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, and so on. It also allows you to determine the percentage of money that you want to save each month, and it calculates the money that you have available to spend. Daily Budget features a pleasing design and effective budgeting tools to get the great picture of your financial situation in real time. It’s a free calculator based on manual entries.
Digit
Digit is an innovative micro saving app that offers the basic steps of budgeting to help you start saving today for a rainy day over time. In fact, the app requires to open an online savings account and save money. It is pretty simple to use, and you can link your bank accounts to the app in order to keep track of your payments and balances. The app is perfectly safe, and you get a private FDIC insured Digit account, in which you have access. The cost is $3 per month.
PowerPay
Power Pay is a top-notch financial application, recently acquired and re-launched by EVO Payments International. The app is mainly used by merchants who offer e-commerce services and telephone orders, and they need to process credit card payments. PowerPay uses Authorize.net for its payment gateway and virtual terminal, allowing merchants to deal with different companies depending on the card acceptance methods required per case. Also, a great advantage of the app is that it does not come with early-termination/cancellation fees. Finally, the app offers interchange-plus pricing, which means that it breaks down the charges going to the creditors, thereby allowing the merchant to calculate the markup charged for the processing of credit payments. In that way, merchants use a transparent pricing model and are able to allocate their expenses accordingly. Free from Utah State University.
Mint
Mint connects to your bank and investment accounts to keep track of your income and expenses. It allows you to categorize expenses to make budgeting easier. It’s free. Many of the expenses are categorized as miscellaneous. It takes some time to label them, if you want that level of detail. I have seen them double count transfers between accounts, with takes some time to sore out. It is most useful for simple financial situations or to get general budget numbers.