Using a budgeting app is an effective way for you to improve your spending habits, track payments, and save money. A good budgeting app can help you identify areas that you may be overspending and opportunities to save. It can help you to prioritize paying down debt and encourage saving. A budgeting app is a mobile application that can sync your credit cards, credit union accounts, and other accounts, and help you keep track of everything in one space. Although the best budgeting apps can be extremely helpful in getting you on the right track, they need your input. With so many apps available, you might be confused about which is best for you. Read on to learn about our favorite budgeting apps to help you get a better handle on your finances.

Five popular budgeting apps

1 Mint

Mint is probably the best-known mobile budgeting app. Mint’s primary feature is budgeting and tracking expenses. The Mint app advertises that it will help you reach your goals with personalized insights, custom budgets, spend tracking, and subscription monitoring – all for free. The app provides several features that will help you track and analyze your personal finances. A favorite feature of the Mint app is the customizable budgets and alerts. It’s easy to create a budget that will categorize all of your purchases. Once Mint memorizes your transactions, it will automatically place them in the correct categories going forward. Mint will also offer free credit score tracking and tips on spending smarter and reducing debt.  

2 YNAB (You Need A Budget)

YNAB advertises that it helps you gain total control over your money. They focus on differentiating from the competition by teaching you how to manage your money and make smarter spending decisions. The app assists users in identifying financial priorities and goals. Features include goal tracking, reporting, and financial habits, and educational support.  You can browse through and watch or listen to videos and podcasts focusing on getting out of debt, budgeting, investing, and more. Users can even take advantage of free virtual workshops on topics such as getting started with YNAB, maintaining your budget, managing credit cards, and eliminating debt, and more. YNAB is a bit costly, but they offer a free 34-day trial to see if it’s for you.

3 Personal Capital 

Personal Capital bills itself as a wealth and cash management app. Similar to Mint, the app automatically pulls data from your financial accounts, summarizing your spending and saving. It will also help a user to build, manage, and forecast for their retirement in one convenient place with a Retirement Planner feature. It will compare investment portfolio allocations to see how your investments are doing with an Investment Checkup feature. Personal Capital also provides users with money management software to help with savings and budgeting, as well as long-term financial planning, including an education planner. Best of all, this app is free. This is a great app choice for investors.

4 PocketGuard

PocketGuard is a free budgeting app for people who want to stay on top of their finances. It separates itself from other budgeting apps by advertising that you will always know what’s in your pocket. They crunch the numbers to show how much spending money you have after budgeting for bills, goals, and other necessities. The app shows you a customizable pie chart of what expenses are eating up most of your budget. Struggling with debt? PocketGuard enables you to set up a debt payoff strategy to follow. If you link your recurring bills, it just might be able to help you negotiate better rates on things such your cable, cell phone, and other bills. While PocketGuard is free, some features are only available to paid users.

5 Fudget

Fudget advertises itself as the budget planner you can actually use. It’s a minimalist budgeting app that’s not feature-rich or complex like some of the others.  If you are just starting out with budgeting and want a simple budgeting app focused on income and expenses, Fudget may be the one for you. It’s free for most features.

Budgeting apps can help you better track your finances

Budgeting apps can help you track your personal finances and get a better handle on your spending. As you read above, each budgeting app may offer different features. Some are free, while others are not. We hope this will help you evaluate and begin to research which budgeting app is best for your needs.