So you’ve moved out on your own. You’ve left the nest. While you may want to celebrate your new freedom, it’s also time to get serious about managing your finances. It can be a daunting task to manage your income and savings, but we’ve got some easy-to-use apps that can help you keep track of your spending wherever you go.
Tracking with Mint
Mint allows users to get a real-time look into all of their finances, from bank account and credit cards to students loans and retirement. Mint monitors and displays your spending in real-time, automatically categorizing your purchases and alerting you when you’ve over spent the self-assigned budget for any given category. This is a great, hands-off app that requires little input from the user and a lot of perks.
Investing with Acorns
Acorns helps turn all of us into savvy stock market players by investing your spare change into a diversified portfolio. After connecting your checking and credit card accounts, Acorns automatically rounds up every purchase made to the next dollar and invests the difference. For example, if you spend $12.50 on a movie ticket, Acorn will invest $0.50 for you.
Saving with Digit
Digit is the money saving genie you’ve dreamed about, helping you save money you didn’t even know you had. By automatically scanning your income and spending patterns, Digit transfers a small amount of savings that it deems you won’t necessarily need to a savings account that it manages.
Budgeting with Goodbudget
Goodbudget offers 21st century budgeting, inspired by an old fashioned system, especially good for those worried about sharing their personal information. Users create “envelopes” for each of their budget categories (e.g. groceries, transportation, rent, etc.) and pre-determine how much they’re going to “put” in each envelope. Users can then record and track their spending, monitoring the amount in each of the envelopes.
Receipts with Wally
Wally is another app that allows users to easily track their spending without connecting their bank accounts. The app allows users to scan receipts, view and sort purchase details and categorize spending, showing how much has been spent daily, weekly, or monthly. Wally even saves your receipts so you can know exactly what you spent your money on.
