9 Great Money Apps to Help You Achieve Financial Goals
Whether you’re looking to make smarter money moves, reach financial independence, generate generational wealth, or simply learn how to save, it can be overwhelming and overly complicated without the right tools.
And now that there’s an app for everything, it can be hard to find the best financial apps for your needs.
So, we went through all of the trial and error, so you don’t have to.
9 Best Apps for Managing Your Finances
We’ve divided the best-underrated apps according to money management categories so you can easily find ones according to your needs and start reaching your financial goals TODAY.
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Budgeting and Expense Tracking
Budgeting is the first step to take on the ladder of financial independence and the most important thing you need to ace when managing your money responsibly.
The trick to budgeting is to track and organize your expense data and history, analyze it correctly, then create a plan and stick to it!
These are the best apps for tracking goals and budgeting:
1. Qube Money
What it does:
Simply put, Qube Money is a revolutionary digitalized money envelope system. There is a Qube for each spending category, which you can customize according to your habits and needs, then you link a debit card to the system to fill each Qube with money. Like an envelope system, there needs to be money in the Qube or category to be able to spend it.
Why We Love It:
Qube Money is our best expense tracking app because not only does it easily help you track expenses, it forces you to stick to your budget.
On top of that, it does it all: The digital envelope system lets you see where you spend the most money and prevents you from overspending by only allowing you to spend within your budget. Plus, the leftover cash in each Qube is automatically saved into a savings Qube of your choice. Qube money has an added layer of theft protection because it only lets money go through unless there’s enough in each Qube.
Qube forces you to slow down and think about your spending, so you’re more mindful and responsible when following your budget daily.
2. Pocketsmith
What it does:
Pocketsmith is a budgeting app specializing in doing many things at once. It’s terrific for budgeting and managing several income streams, forecasting your cash flow with different scenarios, creating multiple budgets, supporting several currencies, and it works with more than 12,000 financial institutions.
Basic membership is free of cost, and other memberships offer more perks at different prices.
Why we love it:
This is the best budgeting app for couples and families who need different accounts, budgets, and data all in one place that can influence each other’s data or stand-alone.
This app is excellent for people looking to create a solid financial foundation and generate future wealth for themselves or their families. It allows you to see how your spending and savings habits can affect you in the future. The “Super Membership” allows you to see 30-year future projections of your finances with different scenarios.
The app has an easy-to-understand tab where you can review your net worth, savings account projections, and goals, as well as how much you’ve earned, spent, and gone over your budget at-a-glance.
3. Tiller Money
What it does:
Tiller is a more efficient and effective tool than budgeting solo on Excel or Google Sheets. After you connect your bank account information, Tiller then populates the spreadsheets daily. Depending on your spreadsheet skills, you can either customize manually or pick the spreadsheet templates of your choice.
Why we love it:
Tiller is the best option for people who are visual learners and LOVE spreadsheets. If you’re new to spreadsheets, you can use the expertly crafted and easy-to-use templates or customize them on your own. After importing and customizing your data, it will then automate and sync as you go.
The spreadsheets include graphs, tables, and data that’s visually easy to navigate and understand. You can import data from several banks and a wide range of income streams and automatically categorize them. Tiller Money also boasts a robust theft protection system like no other.
Saving Money
Just like it’s easier than ever to buy anything you want in seconds, there are now apps that help you automatically save money in seconds.
4. Truebill
What it does:
Truebill helps you keep track of and cancel subscriptions at the touch of a button. It even goes beyond subscriptions and can track upcoming bills and due dates on their built-in calendar.
Why we love it:
Because we’ve all had charges for memberships we forgot to cancel, or we forgot we even had; in fact, Americans spend about $348 a year on subscriptions they’re not even using (!). The cool thing about Trubill is that it also has features to help lower your bills by acting as a third party who reaches out to companies to advocate for your savings.
5. Honey
What it does:
Honey is a free, built-in tool for your browser, and it functions on its own as it sits on your browser tab, automatically searching the web for available coupons that apply to whatever you’re about to buy.
Why we love it:
The ease and effectiveness of this tool speaks for itself. You don’t even know it’s there; it automatically runs coupons and applies those that work.
According to Bankrate, Honey saves users an average of $126 annually on online purchases (that you can put right in your savings account).
Credit Score Monitoring and Management
You need a good credit score to do many things these days, from buying a home to renting a car to getting a good credit card for your needs. It’s also another vital step on the ladder of financial freedom; maintaining a good credit score should always be on your financial to-do list. Here are the apps making it easy:
6. Credit Karma
What it does:
Credit Karma is a free credit service that reports from two credit bureaus: Equifax and TransUnion; from these credit reports, it compiles the info into its own score and details it in a way that anyone can quickly and easily understand.
Why we love it:
One: it’s free. Two: it not only gives you your up-to-date credit score, but it gives you all of the information you need to understand it and how you can raise it—basically, it’s credit scores for dummies. The app alerts you when your credit score goes up or down, what credit cards are your best options, how good your odds are at getting accepted or rejected for any credit card, and how you can work on bringing your debt down and score up. Their Direct Dispute feature is also a big plus because it lets you directly dispute any mistakes in your credit info to the credit bureaus.
7. Identity Force
What it does:
It’s a membership-based comprehensive credit service that reports from all three credit bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, Equifax. Apart from monitoring your credit score, Identity Force offers a variety of features for paying customers to protect them from fraud and help them make better credit decisions.
Why we love it:
It goes a step further in monitoring ALL your official information to detect any fraudulent use of your data and immediately lets you know if there’s any suspicious use of credit cards or accounts in your name. On top of that, it offers you a safety net of $1 million of insurance in case of fraud. Our favorite feature is their future credit simulator that lets you see how your score would be affected in different scenarios. But before paying for this service, explore whether any of your current credit card providers offer free identity theft and protection.
Growing Your Wealth and Savings Account
Investing and trading stocks have been on everyone’s minds this year; more and more people realize the importance of investments to build wealth.
Even if you don’t understand trading and the stock market, these investing apps can teach you the ins and out or just do it for you.
8. Acorns
What it does:
It’s a low-pressure, automatic investing app. Acorns links to your credit or debit cards and will automatically round up each purchase to the nearest dollar and invest the difference for you.
Why we love it:
You are essentially saving while you spend with Acorns. You can customize how much you want the app to round up and set aside each month or transaction so that you’re consistently putting your money where it can grow and you won’t touch it.
We love that the service is very affordable (the cheapest is $1 per month and $5 per month for the most extravagant).
9. M1 Finance
What it does:
M1 is a comprehensive service that offers customized or automated investing, borrowing, and spending options in one place.
Why we love it:
M1 is a good way to dip your toes into more advanced investing as they have self-directed trading and robo investing options with a low minimum investment of $100 and $500 for IRAs. The company boasts of an available 80 professionally curated portfolios for their customers that make automated investing even more effortless.
The added feature of an integrated credit card that gives you cash back and rewards is a good option for people who like to have their money and information on fewer platforms.
Bottom Line
Without a finance degree, resources, and self-discipline, the financial ladder can look staggering. But these apps give you the tools you need to effectively and efficiently make your money go further and reach your financial goals.
For more information on making smarter money moves, visit our blog for more resources. And check out our recommendations for productivity apps to gain back some of your time!
Next: It’s Time to Start Saving For Your Future: 9 Tips to Help You
