The Best Budget Apps of 2020
Finding time to make a budget that you will actually stick to is becoming harder every year. To make an effective budget you need to know exactly how much money is coming into your household and how much is leaving. Sitting down in front of a spreadsheet or scanning over receipts with a notebook can be exhausting. Luckily, with our modern age, we have modern solutions. To ease the burden of tracking every dollar that passes through your hands, you can turn to a variety of money management apps. So, if you’re looking for solutions to your planning, budgeting apps free up your time and reduce the headache of trying to remember what you spent and where.
To make this even easier on you, we’ve compiled some of the top budget apps to make getting your finances under control a lot simpler. So, whether you’re looking for good budgeting apps that can help you plan for an event or just the best budgeting tools that will help you track your expenses, we have something on this list for you.
Mint
If you’re looking for the best budget app with a long track record, then look no further than Mint. This extremely helpful mobile app is brought to you by Intuit, the creators of Quicken and TurboTax, so you can be assured that there was care put into developing Mint.
This budget app is designed to be user-friendly, allowing you to manage your expenditures by sorting them automatically into categories for you, notifying you of any unusual activity, and automating your bill payments. This app will even sync up with your bank, credit cards, and even PayPal, with a feature that alerts you if you go over budget.
Mint is definitely a contender for the best free budget app.
YNAB
YNAB, an abbreviation of You Need a Budget, started off as a personal budgeting app created by CPA Jesse Mecham and his wife. This money budget app quickly became one of the most successful on the market.
This app offers you the standard features of monitoring cash flow, but it also includes much needed financial advice. Coupling the app with financial knowledge has helped millions of people climb out of debt. By following the guidelines of YNAB, you utilize the zero-base budget plan of assigning every dollar towards an expense or to savings. This allows you to immediately know if you’re spending outside of your budget.
This isn’t a free budget app, but it has proven successful for many people to gain financial freedom.
Pocket Guard
If you want an app that takes the guesswork out of building a budgeting plan, then Pocket Guard may be the best budget app for you. This app analyzes your income, bills, and debts and then formulates a budgeting plan to help to whittle away the financial burdens until you’re living a stress-free life.
Pocket Guard tracks and organizes all of your expenses, down to the gum you bought at a convenience store. It then presents your finances in easy to digest graphs, giving you a clear visual representation of your spending habits. The app will show you the best budget plan to begin reducing your expenditures, making it extremely user-friendly.
Pocket Guard offers a free trial to determine if it’s the right fit for you, before switching over to a paid version.
Goodbudget
Goodbudget, formerly Easy Envelope Budget Aid, is designed for ease of use. The intention of this app is to be the best budget app for a household to get their money sorted. It specializes in merging the income of a couple to be put to the best use.
The way that Goodbudget goes about this is by creating “envelopes” that assign your income to a specific function. You create envelopes to make sure that bills are accounted for and so you don’t overextend in any given area. You can create envelopes for utilities, groceries, and any other expenses you can think of, and when you see that the envelope is empty, you know that you used up your monthly budget for that expense.
Goodbudget has two plans, a free version with a basic setup and a $5 per month plan with advanced features.
Mvelopes
Mvelopes is another envelope-based budget app that lets you allocate your funds towards specific expenses. This budget app comes in three different versions to suit the personal needs of anyone looking to restructure their financial life. The versions include a Basic level, a Plus level, and a Complete model.
Regardless of what version and features you’re after, Mvelopes provides each user with live support. If you opt for one of the more advanced versions then you get access to a variety of tools such as a financial consultant who can provide budgeting advice.
Personal Capital
While there are a lot of personal budgeting apps, there aren’t that many which are directed at managing your investments. Personal Capital provides its users with an intensive investment advising package. This app is targeted at high net-worth individuals and provides them with a combination of a robo-advising algorithm and a human financial advisor. The app does offer a free service in which it provides some nice personal budgeting services.
This is one of the top budget apps if you can maintain the minimum investment of $100,000 to access the human advisors. So, if you’re less concerned with saving pennies and more concerned with tracking your investments in the stock market, then this may be the best budget app for you.
Acorns
Acorns is an excellent micro-investment app. The concept behind this app is that you invest any spare change into a portfolio managed by investment experts. It works by taking any extra cents leftover from a transaction on linked credit or debit cards and puts it to work. So, if you’ve just paid $4.90 for that small double-whipped mocha latte, the remaining 10 cents to the nearest dollar would be invested for you.
The beauty of this app is that it uses money that you would easily forget about anyway. You also have the opportunity to invest directly into one of the apps computer-managed portfolios. So, if you’re looking for an app that will help save towards your future, while being relatively hands-off, then this may be the app you’re looking for.
Wally
If you want a budgeting app that zeroes in on budgeting, then you may be interested in Wally. This is one of the best free budget apps that track your household’s cash flow. To maintain your budget, you can either plug in your transaction manually or just use your mobile’s camera to take a pic of the receipt. Wally will also let you know if you’ve reached predetermined goals or are nearing a bill’s due date.
Wally’s dashboard gives you a quick overview of your recent transactions and a general overview of your expenses. This free app may not have all of the bells and whistles, but it does well to do what it’s designed for, and that’s keeping track of your money.
Clarity Money
Clarity Money is a free app provided by Goldman Sachs and had previously won a Webby Award for excellence in 2017 due to its user-friendly design. This app is designed to help you save for your future by providing you an automated saving function as well as giving you a little inspirational boost every day with a quote to set you in the savings mood.
Clarity Money gives you an overview of all of your monthly subscriptions and if you find that one of them is no longer necessary, you can cancel it directly from the app. This app also acts as a credit counselor in that it can provide a bill-negotiation service. If the bill-negotiation service can save you any money on a recurring payment, then all it charges is 33% of the savings.
Simple
Simple is an online bank that offers free checking and savings accounts that users can access through their smartphones. Along with the Simple app, users receive a debit card linked to the account that can show you exactly how you spend your money.
The app comes with built-in budgeting tools that can help you manage your finances. You can see where your money is going, if a transaction has taken place, and what the remaining balance is all in real-time through your smartphone.
If you’ve never tried an online bank before, Simple makes it “simple” to get started.
Every Dollar
EveryDollar is a freemium budgeting app built with the personality of Dave Ramsey behind it. The app is based on the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps formula, as well as the debt snowball repayment method. EveryDollar also relies on the zero-based budgeting system to help users maximize their savings goals.
Using the process of assigning a task for every dollar (get it… EveryDollar) you know what exactly is budgeted for and what is extraneous. Using this app to track your daily spending is a breeze, however, if you opt for the free version then you have to input the transactions you make manually. With the more advanced versions, you can make this process automated.
CountAbout
If you’re looking for the best budget app, then one of the mandatory features should be linking the app to your bank. With CountAbout, that’s exactly the feature you get. The app syncs up to your bank account giving you access to tracking your transactions allowing you to build the perfect personal budget.
A huge bonus to this app is that it can sync more than just to your bank account, you can even sync it to the budget app Mint as well as Quicken. It’s not a free app, but it comes in at an affordable $10 annually for the basic version.
Budgeting and CreditAssociates
Budgeting apps are all about knowing what your money going in and going out looks like, and making plans to get those figures organized and manageable. If you’re in need of assistance when it comes to high-interest and high monthly payment credit card debt, CreditAssociates can help. Contact us today for a free consultation and learn how we can help your budget planning by making your monthly credit card payments significantly lower.