Free Apps To Help You Manage Your Money

With both Christmas around the corner, and after such an unsteady year for our financial situations, many of us may be more concerned with managing our money effectively and staying on a budget. Some may not be able to afford as much, due to job losses or wage cuts, or may be concerned with staying afloat as financial stability is precarious for most of us. Managing money can be difficult during the festive season – a time where purchasing gifts and food for the holiday takes up much of our focus. It can therefore be hard to keep track of your money and stay within budget. One way to alleviate the stress is to look into money-management apps which can help you easily stay on top of your funds. Whether that is organising your outgoings, budgeting, setting up payment reminders and so forth, here are some free options:

Mint
With a focus on your financial overview, Mint is a highly popular and free personal finance and budgeting app, popping up as the top choice on many different tech websites. It offers budgeting tools, can track your money from different banks, automatically categorises transactions and sends alerts when you go over budget. Parent company Intuit also produces well-known apps such as Pocketbooks. It is free but uses targeted financial advertising.

According to Investopedia: ‘You may sync your financial accounts within the app or manually add transactions. Mint allows you to see all your accounts in one place and keep track of your spending on a daily basis. The app automatically organizes your spending, so you can see totals by category at a glance. Mint also offers monthly bill tracking, including payment reminders to avoid late fees. The app also offers the ability to keep track of your investments and check portfolio fees. Mint offers a few education resources like a home affordability calculator, loan repayment calculator, and blog with a variety of personal finance topics. Mint protects your data through features like security scanning with Verisign, multi-factor authentication, and touch ID mobile access. The company stores your login information in a separate database with multiple layers of hardware and software encryption.’

Pocket Guard
Pocket guard is a great budgeting solution that helps you to track your spending, budget and allocate money for savings. It is a quick on-the-go solution to budgeting, and it is free, with the option to upgrade to their Pocketguard Plus model, which costs a $3.99 monthly subscription.

TechRadar rates the app highly, noting its ease of use, safety and great alert system. However, its downside is that It is for more basic money matters and there can be some tech issues. Overall though, it is a pretty useful app, TechRadar writing: ‘Pocketguard gets straight to the point when you first download it with a no-nonsense approach of doing a deep dive into your finances and getting you on the straight and narrow. In a nutshell, it’ll provide you with a one-stop money management solution that lets you track spending and develop a clearer picture of your financial situation. Highlights include the capacity for tracking your incoming and expenses, seeing just how much you’ve got spare while it also lets you build up a bigger picture of your money matters over time. Other key features are the options for creating spending limits so you can cap outgoings where needed, as well as the capacity for setting savings goals. Add it all together and the picture of your finances becomes very clear indeed. Once you’ve got all your data into the software you’ll have an In My Pocket zone, which is the true strength of the app as it gives an instant overview of your money.’

Clarity Money
If users are looking to budget their money, and also monitor their credit score, Clarity Money may be the right app. It is also a free app and was bought by Goldman Sachs in 2018. It is powered by AI and offers the opportunity to open a Marcus online savings account through the Goldman Sachs Brand.

Nerdwallet reviews the app: ‘Clarity Money is a comprehensive budgeting and saving app. Users can link financial accounts from thousands of institutions, organize expenses, track spending and bucket their spending into different categories. There are other features, too, like subscription cancelling and credit score monitoring, which provide a more inclusive financial picture beyond just transactions.’

Personal Capital
Whilst offering budgeting solutions as well, Personal Capital is more of an investment app, helping users to optimize their investment strategies.

The Balance writes: ‘Personal Capital offers a complete investment advising solution, a hybrid robo-advisor, and human advisor service in one. Without paying a cent, you can access Personal Capital’s free money tracking dashboard, which includes some handy budgeting features. Personal Capital put the majority of emphasis on investments, with free and automated analysis of your investment fees, asset classes and other important investment details. The cash flow and budgeting tools are not quite as extensive as other apps on this list, but they work just similarly using the same automated tracking of purchases from linked accounts.’