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Brad Ward
Guest
Budgeting is a very important aspect of handling your money, as it’s often way too easy to spend your money as you please without a plan in place. And thankfully, putting that plan in place is something you can do right on your smartphone, thanks to developers who have created some very handy budgeting applications. Gone are the days of writing down your income on an easily lost sheet of paper!
Wallet
Wallet is a personal favorite tool of mine as it’s one of the most polished options out there for Android. It works just as you might expect any budgeting app to function. You can enter income, expenses, saving plans, add up your debt to begin chipping away at that, and so on. It has some very reliable cloud synchronization, allowing you to quickly and easily access all of your budget information from any device.
Wallet is truly the most polished budgeting app for Android. Why? Wallet lets you do seamless and neat things like adding receipts, warranties, creating shopping lists, and it even allows you to export reports into PDF files. It’s a very handy application for those that need this detailed information.
Mint
Mint is another fan-favorite budgeting application. It allows you to track expenses across all of your account, set up bill reminders and alerts, which will send you emails and text messages to notify you of upcoming bills. You can set up financial goals, such as a vacation you want to take or a pricey item you want to buy, and Mint even lets you get your credit score and offers helpful advice to improve that score.
Mint is truly your personal finance assistant and will get you on the right track at no cost to you! It also has bank-level security, so there’s no need to worry about anyone getting their hands on pertinent information.
You Need A Budget
The You Need A Budget (YNAB) app for Android is the perfect companion to the popular desktop budgeting software. YNAB has all of your basic budgeting functionality, but also lets you to easily split transactions, automatically track spending across all of your accounts, help you to stay aware of how much you have on the go, enter transactions swiftly and easily on the go, and much, much more.
YNAB will cost you $60, which isn’t a bad price to pay for how polished the software is and the freedom that it brings. If you’re not sure about it, there’s also a free trial you can take advantage of to see what it’s all about. Keep in mind that, while the full version does cost $60, it’s a fully-featured budgeting app that, in my experience, has saved me a lot more than $60. With the purchase, the YNAB team even offers free budgeting training videos to help you learn how to handle money better. At least for me, it was a great investment.
Spending Tracker
Spending Tracker is an easy and user-friendly way to quickly track your outgoing funds. It will let you quickly enter in any incoming money and easily categorize what you need to spend it on, whether that be water, heat, rent, eating out, and so on. There’s even some graphs an charts Spending Tracker creates to show you the percentages of where your money is going, how much your saving, and so on.
It’s a neat budget tracker that gets back to the basics!
Goodbudget
Goodbudget is a regularly updated and supported budgeting application that allows you to take control of your finances by employing the envelope system. You can track envelope balances, split transactions between envelopes, import bank account statements for automatic envelope tracking, and more.
One of the cooler things about Goodbuget is that it actually creates reports based on your income, expenses, and spending habits, allowing you to get a detailed look at where all of your money is going. It’s a free download and is definitely worth a shot.
Level Money
Last up on our list is Level Money, an award-winning finance tool that can connect to over 18,000 different US financial institutions. Level Money not only does your standard budgeting, financial report creation, and calculations to stay in your monthly budget, but it also offers top-of-the-line security with 128-bit SSL and AES encryption. You can hook Level Money up to track transactions in your personal bank account, but since Level Money is a read-only tool, hackers won’t have access to your bank account on top of the security already put in place.
I particularly like the reports and insights Level Money creates, giving you a big picture idea of where your money is going, what you can cut back on, and it even averages it all out to tell you how much you’re spending on a per day basis. It’s also the first financial application to be Android Wear compatible, meaning you can get a quick glance at your budget even on the go without pulling out your smartphone.
Closing
It goes without saying, everyone needs a budget to properly take control of their finances, and with just a couple of minutes of your time, each and every one of these applications will help you do that. As mentioned before, budgeting is an important aspect of taking control of your money before it takes control of you. I personally use EveryDollar and other times You Need A Budget, and it truly makes spending guilt free when you know you have cash allocated for certain things.
There’s freedom in having a budget, and these will get you on the right track!
Come comment on this article: Best budgeting apps [2015]
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