Creating and sticking to a budget every month is no walk in the park. From doing the initial money tracking, to setting up your budget categories and allocations, to the actual sticking with your budget, every part of budgeting can seem super daunting and overwhelming. Thankfully, there are plenty of apps to help!
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of budgeting is expense tracking. I’m a huge believer in expense tracking – you can’t set up a successful budget unless you know where your money is going every month. You just can’t budget and save if you have no clue where your money’s going!
While I love paper tracking all of my expenses and using printables for my budgeting, I do also like the convenience of having an app straight on my phone that helps me stick to my budget.
In hopes of sticking to my budget on a consistent basis, I’ve searched high and low for apps that will allow me to do my budgeting on my phone.
Below are 4 apps that I’ve successfully used in order to help me stick tom y budget on a consistent basis. These apps make budgeting from your phone easy-peasy!
1. Mint
Perhaps the most well-known of all apps on the list, Mint is one of my go-to tools for quick, easy and secure budgeting. Owned by Intuit (Quickbooks, TurboTax), Mint securely links to all your bank accounts. It also allows you to create and customize budget categories. AND it automatically categorizes each purchase you make (you can manually change the assigned category as needed).
Mint takes the hard work out of budgeting. It tracks all your expenses and tallies up your spending by category. If you don’t know where to start budgeting, start with Mint.
2. EveryDollar
EveryDollar is AMAZING. The app comes from financial guru Dave Ramsey, and is simple and effective. There’s a free and a paid premium version, depending on your needs.
The free version allows you to set a budget, gives you recommended categories, and has you assign a category/role to every dollar (get it?) If you opt for the free version, you have to manually track every expense – account linking is only available in the paid version.
However, I’m a huge fan of manual tracking, since it makes you really think about and see every purchase that you make, and see how much of an impact it makes on your budget.
EveryDollar is a great app to budget if you want to be hands-on in your budgeting, and seems like a great app to really reach your goals.
3. Personal Capital
Personal Capital allows you to link all of your accounts and see all your balances across the board. You can see every single account balance by simply logging into Personal Capital, how great is that?
Additionally, one of my favorite features of Personal Capital is the ability to see your net worth – and of course it takes into consideration all your debt!
The app connects to so.many.accounts, I didn’t have an issue finding any of my retirement accounts. Not only that, but Personal Capital gives you insights into your investment allocations, makes projections towards your future goals (like retirement or home buying), and allows you to see trends in your budget.
If you like charts, graphs and data(but don’t want to mess with Excel), Personal Capital is the app for you.
4. Google Sheets App
If you’re into the basics, Google Sheets is a great app to have on your phone. If you’re good at excel and like to create and/or maintain your budget there, Google Sheets is a great alternative to keep your budget accessible on your phone.
The beautiful thing about Sheets is that you’re able to not only see your spreadsheets on your phone, you’re also able to edit them. If you’re out and about and need to update your budget, you can see it on google sheets.
If you need to see how much money you have left to spend in a particular category, google sheets is there for you. The possibilities truly are endless with this app.
If you’re into doing your own thing and don’t like to be constrained by other apps, google sheets is the one for you.
Bonus: You Need a Budget (YNAB)
While I haven’t personally used YNAB, I’ve heard rave reviews from people that swear by it! YNAB focuses on zero-based budgeting – it makes you assign a role to every single dollar (similar to Every Dollar).
YNAB is everywhere – it even connects to your Amazon Echo. You can get a free 34-day trial, after that, it costs $84/annually.
What are your favorite budgeting apps?
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