3 Great Personal Finance Tools That You Should Use

Posted by Hannah Lapin on Aug 3, 2018 9:00:00 AM

3 Personal Financial Tools

There’s not a whole lot that’s more important than managing your personal finances. We’ve all got bills to pay. Well, most of us do anyway.  Nobody wants to end up scrambling to find a way to pay their rent or having to settle for a dingy hotel when you go on vacation. Luckily, there’s a lot of different ways that you can keep track of your money and how much your spending, and there’s also several online tools that can help you along the way. Here’s a few of the best ones:

  1.   You Need a Budget 

    Often abbreviated to YNAB, this is a budgeting software that’s available on both Windows and Mac as well as iOS and Android. While there’s a few things that make this app great, the system it uses to help you keep track of your finances is very useful and user-friendly. The unique idea of this app is to enter all of your expenses at the end of each day and then categorize them yourself. You set yourself financial goals and then the app guides you through sticking to them. This is a good way to be familiar with your spending and to learn self-discipline, if you are failing to meet your goals. YNAB will also keep track of your various accounts, such as the bank, your credit cards or any funds you’ve set up such as a retirement fund. Any transactions that are made from these will be automatically imported into the app and factored into your daily expenses. In addition, you get tutorials on financial planning and access to a community of users willing to give you advice once you pay for the full service.
  2. Mint

    Mint is a service that is somewhat similar to YNAB, except for that fact that it’s free and it doesn’t really offer a whole lot of tutorials or advice.  People debate as to which of these two apps is superior, but in truth, they offer fairly different services. Mint’s goal is essentially just to keep track of your expenses, as opposed to educating you on the intricacies of financial planning. You connect all of your online expenses to Mint, including your bank account, credit card and any other funds, and then it monitors your spending for you.  With Mint, you will have a budget put in place and it will warn you if you are spending too much. It’s a simple, to-the-point service and is one of the first of its kind too. It’s always reliable and will definitely help you in keeping track of whether or not you are overspending. Bonus, Mint can help you monitor your credit score.

  3. PocketGuard

    This app is exclusive to mobile devices, so you won’t be able to use it on a laptop or a computer. Similar to the others, though, you connect the app to all of your accounts and credit cards, and it keeps track of how much you are spending. You also need to enter your bills, so that the app will know how much you can spend before you’ll start infringing on your necessary expenses. That’s where the app’s signature feature comes in, which is called ‘In My Pocket’. This lets you know how much money you can spend freely without having to worry about your budget. There’s also the option to include a ‘savings contribution’ as one of your monthly expenses. This might not seem worth it when you’re trying not to spend, but having savings is worth it.  The cool part is, it's not that hard, especially if you have a few more sources of income. Check out this article on suredividend.com for example. Dividend-yielding stocks would be a good way to bring in a bit more money, and PocketGuard could keep track of when it came in and could factor it into your budget and savings.

Essentially, money and managing your finances is something that should definitely be important to you; But you don’t have to do it alone. There are a lot of services out there that can help you, and any one of these would be the perfect choice. Fore more resources on finances, check out the "Finance" category of our blog. For more tools and educational materials, check out our blog

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