Five Fantastic Personal Finance Apps
- Mint
- You Need a Budget
- LearnVest
- Personal Capital
- Acorns
With increasing student debt and decreasing direct employment opportunities in certain industries, personal finance tools have become more important than ever before. Younger people – part of a rising entrepreneurial class in the west – are learning the rules of the money game and becoming more finance-savvy than ever before, a requirement for living well on less.
A wide variety of twenty-first-century personal finance tools are available for those keen on wise financial planning – some of them free. Here are five fantastic personal finance apps.
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Mint
Mint is an incredibly popular finance app, especially for Millennials. Mint allows you to securely connect your bank accounts and credit cards. It tracks your spending, consistently updates your account balances so you know exactly how much you have, and permits you to create budgets in a wide array of different categories. It also allows you to set up reminders for bill pay and mark each bill you enter as paid, and provides financial advice to the user, including credit card and savings account recommendations. The best part? It’s free.
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You Need a Budget
An incredibly useful app for those struggling with debt, You Need a Budget is an app whose cost is far outstripped by its benefits. It provides timely and appropriate advice with four inherent rules that you’ll learn about budgeting and points out where you can improve spending and areas where you may not have budgeted appropriately. The app is free for the first month and is excellent for those who are totally new to budgeting.
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LearnVest
An app for those a bit further along in their money management, LearnVest is an app oriented towards investment and long-term financial planning. Its upfront and monthly cost, however, is extraordinarily valuable to those who are ready to invest – and ultimately will save users money over utilizing a traditional financial planner or investor to start planning their financial future. In addition to the usual financial management tools, it also includes tools for investment and access to a financial and investment advisor anytime you have questions or need advice.
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Personal Capital
A great (and free!) app for those who want to track and grow their wealth, Personal Capital provides all the usual spending importation and budget categories – and a whole lot more. It allows you to keep tabs on your personal investments, track fluxes in them, track your broker fees, and will even provide you with an alert if it thinks you ought to back out on or close an investment account. A premium version is also available for those who want more tailored investment advice.
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Acorns
A brilliant app for starting out with investing, Acorns is a handy little app that tracks your purchases and rounds each one up to the nearest dollar, depositing the change in the investments of your choice. Acorns earns the average user $30 to $180 per month, and in addition to your roundups, you can invest one-time amounts from $20 to $30k.
Each of these personal finance apps is worth a look – and each one can help users effectively manage their personal finance while mapping out a comfortable and bright financial future.
Source: Forbes