Any help you can get will be welcome if you’re taking care of your family economy. In this article, we are talking about applications that will contribute to your family’s budget planning and help you reach your goals faster.
Mint
You can use this app on both iOS and Android. Mint is the most popular financial app on both platforms and is used by millions of people. There are many reasons for this: first of all, you can create different account types. For example, you can create four different accounts for checking, saving, credit card and bills at the same time and track them all. This goes for budgeting too: Mint lets you create different budgeting accounts. You can create separate accounts for your grocery expenses and for your bank payments or even for entertainment (if you want to allocate a separate budget for online casino real money games or video games, for example). Even paid apps do not offer this level of freedom to the user.
In addition, thanks to the TransUnion partnership, you can query your credit score as much as you want and follow the changes in this score in real time. However, despite all these advantages, Mint has two major drawbacks. The first is the lack of joint account support – the app is designed for a single person to use. The second is that it contains too many ads, and there is no way to remove them. In other words, there is no option to turn off ads by paying. Still, in many ways, Mint is currently the best free budgeting app for any mobile platform.
Personal Capital
This is an app by Empower, and it offers much more than a classic budgeting app. You start by adding all your financial accounts to the application. These are analyzed, and a report is prepared for your financial situation. After that, it’s all about how much you’re willing to pay. Personal Capital is a free app, but some features require payment. You can see how ready you are for retirement for free and get some tips to save you from paying some fees. If you’re ready to pay, however, the app also gives you advice on what investments would be best suited to your financial report.
Personal Capital only has the most basic budgeting features, so it doesn’t allow you to keep track of your accounts and payments as advanced as Mint. However, it can analyze your current financial situation and give very consistent advice on what to do next. In other words, if you are not only interested in creating a budget but also managing it, Personal Capital will be one of the best options.
You Need a Budget (YNAB)
YNAB is an app released in 2004 and claims it can save new users an average of $600 in the first two months. It’s still a budgeting app, but it just doesn’t offer tracking features. Its main purpose is to create different budget categories and allow you to assign a goal to each of them. For example, let’s say you want to buy a car: you can create a budget of 10,000 USD for it. After adding all your income and expenses to the application, you will see what you can do and how many resources you can allocate to achieve this goal.
YNAB encourages users to use their money wisely and helps them achieve their goals by preventing them from wasting their income. Hence the $600 savings it promises: YNAB reduces the money you would normally spend on unnecessary things, making it possible for you to use it to achieve the goal you set. The application is not free, but you can use it without paying for the first 34 days and see for yourself how well it works.
Pocket Guard
We can define Pocket Guard as a budgeting application that can give advice. It can also make very detailed reports. The application has a feature called IMP (in my pocket). This feature allows you to have an idea of how long it takes to reach a financial goal using your estimated income and bill payments. This is a feature similar to the YNAB budget goals, but it mainly serves to show the amount of money you can freely spend in your pocket at any given moment and allows you to use this money for your financial goals if you wish.
You can prepare detailed reports with all the data you enter into the application. These include Excel spreadsheets and pie charts. In addition, you do not need to record your expenditures one by one: when you define your credit card in Pocket Guard, all the expenditures you make with that card are automatically added to the application. Unfortunately, you have to pay or subscribe to take advantage of most of these features. There is also a free version of the app, but it only includes very basic features.
Good Budget
This is designed as a budget tracking app and is similar to Mint in many ways. However, one of the most important shortcomings of Mint is not found in Good Budget: joint accounts. Different people can use the application with different profiles, and the data entered by each is processed into a common database. So, for example, you can install this application on your children’s phones and track their expenditures from your own profile. The app also has a “debt accounts” feature. By adding any of your debts (e.g., bank loan, mortgage, etc.) to this account, you can easily see when you will become debt-free.