Personal finance can be a challenge. What’s more, it’s an important one that everyone must deal with. Personal financial decisions made now can have huge impacts on people later in life. Never discount the power of compound interest! Keeping an eye on personal finances is very important, and luckily, today it’s easier than ever before to do that. There are plenty of apps on the market that should make personal finance much more frictionless for 2020.
Mint is one of the most famous free personal finance apps on the market. Mint is made by Intuit, the same people behind the business software QuickBooks. Mint is available for both Apple and Android platforms. This is a great, user-friendly app. It’s perfect for recent graduates and other newcomers to the world of personal finance. Mint has great budgeting tools, too. It can link up with bank accounts, loans and credit card accounts. Then, based on that information, Mint will suggest budgets for the user. Mint also offers MintSights. These are personalized insights developed by analyzing the user’s data.
An app that’s great for people used to a more analog budgeting system is Goodbudget. This app helps people put money into “envelopes” for categories like food, rent or entertainment. Users must stick to the budget, ideally spending less than they’ve allotted for the category. Instead of working with literal cash in paper envelopes, Goodbudget maintains the system digitally, online. This is a system that can work very well for disciplined users who like to do things old-school. There is a free version of this app, allowing people up to 10 envelopes. The paid version allows people to use an unlimited number of envelopes for their budget.
Finally, Personal Capital is an app that’s designed for experienced, savvy, power users. Personal Capital isn’t just a way to set and abide by a budget. It offers a whole host of tools, set up on a dashboard. Personal Capital tracks money going out and coming in. It also makes it easy to track investments. This app also offers a retirement planning tool. Personal Capital can even link up with retirement accounts and investment accounts in order to provide the best insights about a user’s personal finance picture.
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