3 Great Apps for Managing Your Personal Finances
October 31, 2019
An intimate knowledge of your personal finances is a must, but this can, sometimes, prove to be challenging as it’s not uncommon that your personal finances will grow more complicated as you move through life. For example, how you managed your money in your early 20s versus your strategy for finances when you become a homeowner is likely to look vastly different from one another.
If you’re someone who enjoys doing this work manually, our hats go off to you. If not, you’re in luck. This digital era we find ourselves in offers a number of fantastic personal finance tools, including apps, that keep track of your spending amount and the ratio of where your money is going. Even better, there is a wide array of apps for investing, bill payments, and more.
We’ve collected three apps that are good ways to either supplement your manual spreadsheet input or simply make personal finance easier.
1. General Personal Finance – Mint
Mint is a free app available to U.S. and Canadian citizens through their parent company, Intuit Inc. The app offers personal finance management by unifying all your bank and finance accounts through the app. With this tool, you can monitor your assets in one place, track your bill payments, as well as manage your spending through their daily budget planner.
This app offers a user-friendly platform for those just beginning their financial planning journey or those who have a more complicated portfolio (investments, credit, banking accounts) that they’d like to be able to check on more easily from one place rather than several. Generally, if you’re on your phone regularly and are looking for an app that will do all the work for you, this might be the right fit for you.
2. Bill Payments – Prism
If managing when to pay your bills is proving to be difficult, consider trying out Prism. Like Mint, Prism is a free app that is compatible with most mobile phone operating systems. The difference between these two is Prism focuses on helping users link their bills to the app—providing a universal view of all that they owe, making it easier to pay bills on time and quickly. While Mint used to offer a bill pay service, they now no longer do due to dwindling user numbers.
Prism tracks your bills for you, including subscription services, cable providers, insurance companies, mortgages, and more. Prism supports payments to over 11,000 billers including some local to your state and county.
3. Investing – Robinhood
Investing is the part of personal finance that can seem the most intimidating. Nowadays, more apps are popping up that make buying stocks and investing more accessible. Robinhood is an app that offers a way to understand and participate in the stock market with commission-free stock options, cryptocurrency, low minimums, and more. There isn’t really an easy way to invest money but this app certainly works at simplifying.
If you’re a more advanced investor, this app might not be as appealing for you as the application’s interface isn’t as dynamic as an online broker. However, it’s this same design that can make investing quite literally easier on the eyes for those who are newer to the game.
If investing is still something you’re not quite comfortable with, check out this blog post to get a clearer picture of your options.
Whether you choose to use an app to help you manage your personal finance is up to you. Mobile banking is still relatively new with troubleshooting and changes taking place regularly. Generally, the best benefit of integrating apps into your personal finance management is having the option to easily monitor your finances from anywhere that’s Wi-Fi accessible and/or where your mobile carrier provides service.
Interested in the financial independence movement?
Check out this blog post to learn more about how you can begin your own journey to becoming financially independent.
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