Budgeting is an essential foundation of personal finance. But while there are great apps available to manage your overall finances, you may not need a financial adviser, a bill cutter or recommendations for the best credit cards.
There are several things to consider when you’re looking for a good budgeting app:
How to Determine the Best Budgeting App for You
Price: Tiered plans priced at .97 a month, .97 a month and .97 a month
- What we liked about Mvelopes was the ability to access it by laptop. But the Mvelopes desktop interface looks like it came straight out of Windows 2000.
- It’s easy to make a zero-based budget through the app, because you can change values based on what you anticipate making.
- Final verdict: By the name, you can guess it’s best for envelope users, but you can use any type of budget beyond that. Unfortunately, it has some of the same bank syncing limitations as the free apps — but you pay for it.
- You can buy individual add-ons for additional features like repeat notifications or advanced filtering. You can get all the available add-ons for .99 per year. It’s a great price compared to other apps with annual membership.
Price: annually
The 8 Best Budgeting Apps We Found
Overall, the app and website are really nice. You can make a monthly savings goal, mark bills as recurring and see how much you have in your “pocket” for the day, week or month. You’ll have to play around with it to make sure PocketGuard is sorting everything right, but once you do that, it’s very hands-off.
Honeyfi: The Overall Winner
It has some features EveryDollar doesn’t. For example, it lets you roll over any unused cash to the next month’s envelope, and it reports on your spending by envelope or month.
Available on: Apple and Android
Available on: Apple and Android
Available on: Apple and Android
Available on: Apple and Android
Available on: Apple and Android
Final verdict: It offers affordable transaction syncing, but we don’t know what budgeting method you’d use for PocketGuard. It’s a good accompaniment, but we wouldn’t use it as a sole budgeting app.
Final verdict: It offers affordable transaction syncing, but we don’t know what budgeting method you’d use for PocketGuard. It’s a good accompaniment, but we wouldn’t use it as a sole budgeting app.
One cool feature is “sweeping envelopes.” At the end of the month, if you have cash left over in an envelope, you can “sweep it” to your savings account, debt payoff or investment account envelope.
User experience. Are you OK with ads? Credit card offers?
We think it’s the best app on our list. And no, they didn’t pay anyone at The Penny Hoarder to say that.
What we don’t like is that after you sync your bank accounts, neither the web version nor the app will upload previous transactions. If you want to start from scratch, this is fine. But if you’re trying to start a budget mid-month? Not so good.
If you have a partner, you can communicate about transactions within the app and limit what transactions your partner can see. <!–
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Honeyfi is technically a budgeting app for couples, but single people shouldn’t write it off. You can easily add two of your email accounts and be your own domestic partner.