In order to successfully manage your finances, it’s important that you not only save every penny in your bank account. You also have to understand your cash flow from beginning to end, so as to plan around it and make smarter decisions in the future. Otherwise, you might be thinking you’re doing a good job while the opposite is happening.
It’s fortunate, then, that so many financial management apps are flooding the market. This will allow you to access your financial situation virtually anywhere you go while offering you a wealth of options, ranging from a simple check of your bank balance to analyzing your spending habits and offering you advice to make better decisions in the future.
Here are the best free budget apps to manage your finances:
Personal Capital
One of the best personal investment management apps out there, Personal Capital allows you to keep an eye on your budget and your investment accounts with a user-friendly interface, graph generation, and even personal help from a professional in some cases. Also, you can access this information from your desktop or laptop as well, making it easier to track your money.
Meant to show you the big picture of your total finances, Personal Capital does not offer such strong personal budgeting options, nor as intuitive, as other options in this list, but it’s good to get a sense of where you stand at the moment.
Spendee
A good choice if you want a personal expense-track app with a very visual interface, Spendee is for you. This nifty app automatically downloads your transactions and categorizes them, while allowing you to share parts of your budget with other people.
If you’re trying to keep track of your expenses while traveling, Spendee has a travel mode that converts your budget to multiple currencies, and also encourages accountability by letting you track and share different virtual wallets.
Wally
Are you looking for a more stripped-down app to check your budget? Then look no further than millennial-favorite app Wally, which lets you know how much money you have as soon as you log into it, and how much of it is left until the end of the month. Additionally, one of its more unique features is the ability to save pictures of your receipts so you can keep track of taxes and such in a paperless way.
Like Spendee, Wally also supports most foreign currencies to stay on top of your budget while traveling, no excuses!
PocketGuard
As we said, understanding your cash flow is the most important part of managing your finances, but saving money is still necessary. Aside from keeping track of your expenses by synching up your accounts through various devices, PocketGuard will pick up recurring bills and look up better deals on the internet.
You can also identify trends in your monthly expenses, track individual bills and other personal functions that will help you save money in the long run, including the basic budgeting functions of other apps, of course.
Albert
Combining the features of a budgeting app and a personal assistant, Albert is one of the more interesting options in our list. Mixing AI and human guidance, Albert gives you personalized information about your finances and creates a budget for you based on your spending habits, bills and income. Like Wally, Albert also helps you set money aside in a savings account for different important uses, like housekeeping or groceries.
This is a free app, but a premium option lets you contact a professional to further help your budgeting efforts and get tips on how to improve your money managing skills.
Just because you start using an app doesn’t mean that you’re tied to it; download and try them all until you find the one that’s just right for you. Even if you don’t think you’ll need a particular function, give it a shot, because it might be your ace in the hole to save money in the long run.
