The best free personal finance software 2018. The program can help you to stick to a budget and for anyone who is completely new to the concept of accounting, the Buddi website has a number of.
Managing your money is a complex skill, especially now that you no longer have to leave the house or even pull out your wallet in order to spend money. That’s why it is more important than ever for you to track spending. But the old-school methods of budgeting can be far too onerous for the new Millennium. Hardly anyone wants to be carrying an old-fashioned ledger book around with them to record financial transactions. Creating your own Excel spreadsheets sounds like the world’s worst homework assignment for some. That’s where personal finance budget software comes in.
There are many different budgeting and tracking programs available to help both beginning and veteran budgeters get a solid handle on their finances. Read our comprehensive list below to learn which program will work best for your financial situation. Quick Links to Budget Software Reviews: All-In-One Budget Software. Zero-Based Budget Software. Money/Budget Assistants.
Other Budget Software. Budget Software Graveyard. Change. Hip Money. Penny.Most Popular.New All-In-One Budget Software Personal Capital One way to describe budgeting software is an “account aggregator.” This program allows you to track and understand every single penny in all of your financial accounts. Once you link up all of your various accounts, including your bank accounts, investments, mortgage, credit cards, and any other accounts, Personal Capital summarizes your finances and offers you basic investment guidance. Considering the fact that Personal Capital also tracks investments, it offers a more comprehensive (and free!) service than similar competitor Mint.
On your dashboard, the program generates graphs and charts to help you better understand your financial picture, including the following:. Net Worth.
Account Balances. Income Reports. Spending Reports. Asset Allocation.
Investment Returns. Projected Investment Fees Basic budgeting is also a snap with this program, as the interface gives you an understanding of all of your spending and account balances, and allows you to categorize your spending by date, merchant, and type of expense. The mobile app for iPhone and Android allows you to keep track of your budget even when you’re not at your computer. Personal Capital also offers a Retirement Planner tool that can help you build, manage, and forecast your retirement savings. You can use the Investment Checkup feature that asks you to create a basic risk profile, pick a target retirement date, and your projected income sources, and the program will recommend a portfolio for you. Finally, there is a fee analyzer that can help you to understand the fees you are paying on your current investments. As with all other web-based personal finance programs, Personal Capital uses the same security and encryption you can expect from online banking.
Pros: The most comprehensive aggregate of financial information, making this ideal for those with complex finances. Basic investment guidance is a major plus.
Cons: The program is not as customizable as some others–neither asset allocations nor spending categories are customizable. Cost: Free.
See our. Learn more and get started with Clarity Money launched in January 2017, and was acquired by Goldman-Sachs in the spring of 2018. Though it's still a relative newcomer to this field, it has been quite the mover and shaker. The company’s mission is to offer a service that will both watch your back when it comes to your money choices, and help you take control of your financial life.
The founders of the app believe that consumers deserve nothing less than transparency and advocacy in their financial choices. They designed Clarity Money to provide exactly that.
After you download the app onto your Android, iPhone, or other Apple device, you then connect your accounts to Clarity. The program analyzes your spending data before making suggestions to you on how you can optimize and save your money. Clarity Money is able to do this through their Bill Cancellation service, which identifies wasteful recurring charges and will cancel those services for you. The site promises that Clarity will not make a recommendation that does not objectively improve your financial well-being, so you can feel secure that your finances will improve by acting on the app’s recommendations. There is also an algorithm on the app that will help you to find lower interest rate credit cards and/or personal loans.
These sponsored products are how the app makes its money, but the site makes it clear that only the products or services that may be of interest to you will be shared with you. You can also through the app, which works with Experian and uses the VantageScore model. In addition to its basic money-saving tools, Clarity Money also allows you to set up automatic savings through a Marcus by Goldman Sachs high-yield savings account.
You can open this account with as little as $1, and set up an automatic recurring transfer for as little as $0.01. Everything is done within the app and can all be accomplished with a couple of finger taps. The money in your Marcus high-yield savings account is FDIC insured up to $250,000.
It’s also important to note that the app will provide you with a daily summary of your spending, which includes automatic categorization of your purchases. This simple daily breakdown of your spending will help you improve those habits and take better care of your finances. Pros: Clarity Money takes care of everything within the app, which makes it easy to act on their recommendations. The app offers a fairly global look at your money, helping you cancel unnecessary recurring expenses, save more money, and understand your money habits better.
Cons: The automatic categorization of your purchases does not allow for split categorizations. Fees: None. Clarity Money makes its money through the sponsored products and services suggested to users. You do not have to use any of the suggestions made to you. Best For: Newbie budgeters or anyone who wants their money management to be easy and all in one place.
To learn more and get started with Clarity, visit. Mint is the OG free web-based personal finance tracker launched all the way back in 2006 and has been a staple of modern money management ever since. When you sign up with Mint, you provide the program with all of your financial accounts, including bank accounts, investments, retirement funds, credit cards, 529 accounts, and even real estate purchases. Mint allows you to see all of your financial information in a single dashboard, which also calculates your net worth.
To get into the nitty-gritty details of your finances, Mint tracks your transactions and automatically assigns an income or expense category for each one. It also assigns a default budget to each category of expenses, although you can create your own monthly budget, as well. The default mode is a nice way to start budgeting if you’ve never done so. You can see your financial progress using the trends function, which creates graphs and charts of your finances to help you understand where your money goes. Mint also helps you create goals–both savings and debt reduction–and tracks your progress. It’s important to note that Mint does gain access to your login credentials. So there is the potential for exposure of this information.
However, Mint offers the same kind of security you see at an online bank, making them just as safe as Capital One or Bank of America. Pros: Mint is completely free, very user-friendly, and offers balance and spending alerts to keep your money on your mind. Cons: You have to manually track cash spending, some automatic expense categories are not useful/incorrect and need to be changed by the user. Cost: Free. See our. To learn more and get started with Mint, visit Quicken is the great-granddaddy of personal finance software–it was first introduced back in 1983.
Though Quicken was owned by Intuit until a few years ago, the current version, Quicken 2019, has all the familiar tools and offerings that anyone who cut their teeth on the Intuit versions are used to. For many people, Quicken’s biggest selling point is the fact that it is a software program you install on your hard drive. This means all of your sensitive financial information is also stored there–making it secure from any potential hackers gunning for online personal finance programs. And new this year, you can now manage your money on the go across desktop, web, and mobile.
Quicken offers a great deal of customization and control and you can make the program work for your specific circumstances. In particular, investors can easily use Quicken to track their portfolios and quickly find any data they need in order to make investment decisions.
The newest version of this software now allows users to automatically track and pay bills. Of course, Quicken is also well-known for its sunset provision that stops online features and formatted files from working after a certain time period, which means users have to buy a new license to continue using the software. Often, these updates also include a new interface, meaning users have to relearn the program after each update. Pros: Quicken is the most comprehensive personal finance software available. Security-conscious users can rest assured that their information is completely safe. Cons: The sunset provision can be extremely frustrating. Cost: Between $35 and $55, depending upon which specific software package you purchase.
Zero-Based Budget Software YNAB (YNAB for short) is an online budgeting program based on the envelope method, wherein budgeters set money aside for specific categories of spending. The program guides you through the process of budgeting, setting goals and sticking to them, and reconciling accounts. The philosophy behind YNAB is built on that will help users live within their means:. Give Every Dollar a Job–All money you receive is assigned to a specific budget category. Embrace Your True Expenses–Understand your irregular expenses. Roll With the Punches–You can strategically rearrange budget categories if your spending doesn’t exactly align with your plans. Age Your Money–You can end the paycheck-paycheck cycle by building a buffer of one month’s cash in hand.
YNAB believes that in order to successfully budget, you need to be hands-on with your money. Until the version released in December 2015, users had to manually enter all transactions–although the program and its companion apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices made this very easy. This also means that YNAB is one of the few programs that easily allows users to track cash spending. However, the program does now automatically import transactions, but it is up to the user to assign each transaction to its appropriate budget category. You may still use manual entry if you prefer, or a combination of automatic and manual.
In addition to the program, signing up for YNAB gets you access to financial literacy classes, tutorials, a community of YNAB users, blog posts, and budgeting tools and tricks. As with Mint, YNAB’s security is bank-grade, and the program relies on third-party audits to maintain data privacy. At $83.99 for a 12-month subscription (i.e., $6.99 per month), YNAB is not the cheapest personal finance program around, but you get a generous 34-day free trial before you commit.
Pros: YNAB is geared toward teaching users how to budget and make managing their finances a habit. The large online community can be very helpful. Cons: The hands-on nature of the program might not appeal to all users. The cost is higher than most other personal software. Cost: $50 per year To learn more and get started with YNAB, visit ProActive Budget is the digital version of cash envelopes. The cash envelope method of budgeting is the age-old technique for preventing overspending.
The problem is that we live in an increasingly cashless society, and it can be tough to apply envelope budgeting strategies to modern methods of spending. Proactive is a forward-thinking solution that helps you make proactive decisions before purchases versus tracking your money afterward.
With this program, you will receive a Visa-branded ProActive debit card that you will transfer money to and then categorize into virtual envelopes. When it comes time to make a purchase, you will open the app and tap which envelope the funds are coming from before swiping your card. If you forget to choose a spending category, your card will be declined. ProActive has also recently introduced a Kid Card, another no-fee debit card that you can use to pay their allowance, split money into customizable spending categories, use for purchases with or without a phone, and even share family spending categories so you can ask your teen to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home from school without having to reimburse her. In addition, you can also link a credit card to the account. When you, ProActive automatically pays the amount of transaction to your credit card immediately, effectively turning your credit card into a debit card.
This means you can get the great rewards offered by credit cards and avoid the trap carrying a balance month to month. Another great feature is the Partner Permissions, which can make sure both spouses are on the same page when unexpected expenses crop up. With this feature, if you want to spend money from one of the categories that requires partner permission, the app will send a message to your spouse asking for permission to open the category for spending. This feature ensures that one partner can't “accidentally” spend the Christmas fund on a new gadget when the other doesn't agree. Spouse can turn on the feature for any category. The one possible concern about the app is that if you are unable to use your phone at the time of a purchase, you will not be able to use your ProActive debit card.
A spending category remains open for 30 minutes, so if you know you will be going phoneless, you can plan ahead. However, using this app could be problematic if you have any issues with data on your smartphone.
Pros: Like traditional envelope budgeting, you cannot make a purchase with ProActive Budget unless you know which envelope the money is coming from. That's the brilliance with this innovation.
The credit card linkup allows you to enjoy the benefits of credit while making sure you set aside the money to pay off your bill each month. Cons: The fact that you are unable to use your ProActive debit card if you do not have your phone available could be problematic if you lose a data connection.
ProActive recommends taking a separate pay card to alleviate this concern. Cost: The program costs $69 per year ($5.75 per month) for the primary card. To add a companion card, it will cost an additional $29 per year ($2.42 per month), and each kid card costs $24 per year ($2 per month). Learn more and get started with. Use the code PTMONY to get a $5 discount when you subscribe. Mvelopes Like YNAB, is personal finance software that offers a 21 st century method for following the envelope budgeting method.
This online tool has both Android and iPhone apps that allow you to keep track of your spending on the go. When you sign up with Mvelopes, you link up to four bank accounts (including checking accounts, credit card accounts, and PayPal accounts, among others) and create an unlimited number of spending “envelopes” to manage your spending. The program automatically tracks your transactions, which you then assign to the correct spending envelope.
The amount of your transaction is subtracted from the money in that envelope. You may also manually track cash transactions. One of the unique features of Mvelopes is how it handles credit card purchases. When a user makes a purchase using a credit card, the program removes the transaction amount from the spending envelope and places it in a special envelope to pay off the credit card. When your credit card bill arrives, the amount due is already set aside in the envelope, so you will be able to pay off your bill in full. The basic Mvelopes program costs $4 per month or $40 per year if you pay all at once.
The next tier is Mvelopes Plus, which costs $19 per month or $190 per year. This program offers everything in the Basic version, but also offers access to a debt reduction plan and guidance and a quarterly check-in from a personal finance trainer. The Mvelopes Complete version costs $59 per month, or $149 per quarter, or $549 per year. If you sign up for the Complete version, you get monthly one-on-one sessions with a personal finance trainer, a customized financial plan, and full access to all the budgeting tools on the platform. As with other online personal finance programs, your information is kept secure with the same top-level SSL encryption technology used by all major banks. Pros: Mvelopes is set up to be interactive in order to teach users how to budget. The credit card spending envelope feature is a very helpful aspect of the program.
Cons: Multiple reviewers have stated that the program is not necessarily intuitive. Cost: $4/month or $40/year for Mvelopes Basic, $19/month or $190/year for Mvelopes Plus, $59/month or $149/quarter or $549/year for Mvelopes Complete. See our. To learn more and get started with Mvelopes, visit. EveryDollar Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt and budgeting guru, released his free online budgeting software in March of 2015. In keeping with his teachings, is focused on tracking every dollar.
That way all of your money is accounted for and you know exactly where it is all going. According to the EveryDollar website (and borne out by multiple testers), you can create a budget on their intuitive and user-friendly online program in 10 minutes. The program offers eight main spending/saving categories to help you get started with creating your budget. These include:.
Giving. Savings.
Housing. Transportation.
Food. Lifestyle. Insurance & Tax. Debt If you decide to create additional categories in your budget, the program makes that category a savings goal, and you will input how much you plan to spend for each category per month.
Creating the budget is the easiest part. From there, it is up to you to input all of your transactions manually. (EveryDollar Plus, which costs $99 per year, will automatically import transactions for you.) There are both iPhone and Android apps available to make inputting transactions simple while you are out and about. One common complaint about EveryDollar is that it does not allow users to create recurring transactions, which can cause you more work as you try to reconcile your transactions with your budget. One added benefit to using budget software from Dave Ramsey is the fact that EveryDollar helps you walk through his seven baby steps to get out of debt and build wealth. The program offers you the option of using excess funds for the baby steps, which can help you reach your financial independence. Pros: The program is very easy to set up, with an intuitive user-interface and well-thought-out defaults.
If you are a follower of Dave Ramsey’s teachings, EveryDollar will help you meet the goals he suggests. Cons: The free version of the software does not automatically add transactions, nor does it allow you to set up recurring transactions, which can cause some reconciliation headaches. Cost: EveryDollar basic is completely free. EveryDollar Plus costs $99 per year.
To learn more and get started with EveryDollar, visit. SpendPal (Formerly Envudu) was designed in collaboration with Dr. Dan Ariely’s Behavioral Science Lab at Duke University.
SpendPal offers another option for envelope budgeters in. When you sign up, the program asks you to sort the money in your checking account into separate spending Categories. You give each Category a monthly allowance and rank your Categories in order of priority. Whenever a new deposit comes into your bank account, your Categories are automatically filled in order.
When you make a purchase, you will open the SpendPal app on your phone, select which Category you are spending from, and swipe your debit card to complete the purchase. If you don’t have your phone available, the app will deduct the transaction from your default spending category. When this happens it will mark the purchase as unverified, and you will be prompted to verify or re-categorize it the next time you use the app.
If you are tempted to make a purchase that would overspend the proper category, then you will need to make a trade-off from another category. This can help you pause long enough to decide if the purchase is worth raiding another spending category. Though SpendPal officially launched in June 2018, it is still in beta testing, which is good news for you.
All beta testers get to use SpendPal for free for a full year. When it becomes fully available, there will be an unspecified monthly or yearly subscription fee for the service. Pros: For beginning budgeters, the automatic filling of your spending categories can be an excellent introduction to money management.
The fact that you can make “unverified” purchases without your phone available could be handy for the phone challenged. Cons: The availability of “unverified” purchases without a phone could get some users in trouble. The lack of a credit card option might turn some users off. Cost: Free for beta testers.
There will be an unspecified monthly or yearly subscription fee once the program becomes fully available. To learn more and get started with SpendPal, visit. Money/Budget Assistants Pluto Money is an entirely free app is specifically geared toward helping “the Snapchat generation” get a handle on their money. Once you’ve downloaded the free Pluto app (which is currently only available for iPhone, although Android users can join a waitlist), the program will have you start by setting short- and mid-term savings goals, since having something to save for is such an important part of getting finances in order. To help you save more, Pluto gives you simple challenges specifically tailored to your finances. For instance, the app might challenge you to spend less than your average in coffee purchases this week or month. When you succeed, the app will show you the savings impact on your goals, although it is up to you to manually transfer the saved funds over to your goal account.
Pluto also offers Peer Insights, that can help you see how your spending compares to your peers. You can see how your stats compare using criteria that include age, gender, income, relationship status (which includes dating, so it’s not just the married/single binary), and college campus. You can even play around and compare you spending to different demographics. The app’s Behavioral Nudges are notifications that encourage you to save more for your goals and stay on track with your challenges.
There are also notifications for when new transactions post, which have helped users to catch fraud. One of the newest features on the app is the Personal Insights feature. This offers a lightweight, actionable way for you to learn about your finances and habits without getting overwhelmed. You’ll see snapshot summaries, then you can dive into details only if you want to or need to.
You have the option of easily taking part in challenges on the spending categories you want to cut down on. Unlike other apps that can show you the insights into your finances, this feature combines the information with actionable challenges to help you improve.
Pros: The app is very user-friendly and is geared toward both helping you learn more about your money and make better decisions with your money. Cons: Currently, the app is only available for Apple, although an Android version is in the works. Cost: Free To learn more and get started with Pluto Money, visit. Joy was created to improve your happiness by changing the way you choose to spend and save your money.
Scott Saunders, CEO of, pulled together a team of talented psychologists, neuroscientists, financial service experts, designers, and technology professionals to create an app that focuses on the psychology of people’s relationship with money. Their objective is to help people develop a positive relationship with money, so they can achieve their financial goals and dreams. The Joy app will help you do two things: rate your spending and save money.
The app will ask you to rate each transaction you make with either a smiley face or a sad face. This will help you recognize what spending makes you happy so you can stop making purchases that don't add to your life. As for the savings, each day when you open the app, you will be asked to save an amount of money that Joy's algorithm has found “safe” to save. The money goes into an FDIC-insured Joy Savings account. Currently, Joy is only available for iPhone users but has a waitlist for anyone using Androids. Once you download Joy onto your iPhone, you will be prompted to answer a set of questions. These questions determine your personality type and your money philosophy in order to better understand you and to help you reach your financial goals.
You are then paired with a money coach based on the answers you provided. Your money coach will help guide you to take control of your finances. Pros: This app gives you the opportunity to improve your financial habits by asking you to think about how your spending makes you feel and by prompting you to set aside savings every day. Cons: The app is not currently available for Android. Fees: Free. Platform: Currently, Joy is only supported on iOS platforms and they are working on launching an application for Android in the near future.
Best For: Anyone who wants to improve their spending habits with strong support and encouragement from a coach’s feedback. To learn more and get started with Joy, visit.
Pennies is a very intuitive iPhone app helps even the most absent-minded of spenders to stay on budget. Pennies allows you to set a number of budgets (such as monthly fun money, weekly food spending, and the like), with a start date, length of budget term, and the amount available to spend. Each time you make a purchase, you enter the amount into Pennies, which will show you the number of dollars and days remaining in that particular budget. The app uses colors to help you gauge the health of your budget–a red background shows you that your money is quickly dwindling, while green and blue lets you know you are cleared for additional purchases. If you forget to log purchases, you’ll get an occasional reminder from the app to go back to tracking.
Pennies does not sync with your financial institutions and only tracks a single source of money at a time. This can make things a little difficult for anyone with multiple bank accounts or payment methods. Pros: This app is easy to use and offers a convenient method for tracking spending. Cons: Pennies only tracks one source of money, which means it might not work for individuals with more complicated finances.
The app is only available for iPhone. Fees: $3.99 one time purchase fee. Best For: Beginning budgeters. To learn more and get started with Pennies, visit Other Budget Software Debitize was the runner-up, and it definitely earned a place in modern FinTech.
It offers a solution for consumers who have trouble with credit card spending but do not want to give up the protections and rewards offered by credit cards. When you sign up with Debitize, the program will begin monitoring your credit card activity. When a charge is made it will automatically transfer the amount of your credit card transaction from your checking account into your Debitize account.
Then, the program automatically pays your credit card bill on the due date with money set aside in your Debitize account. If you choose to sign up for Credit Optimizer (for a $3/month subscription fee), Debitize will pay your credit cards weekly instead of monthly. To make sure Debitize does not overdraw your checking account, you can set up a minimum balance amount. (The default minimum balance is $100, but you can set it to whatever amount will work for you.) The program will notify you when Debitize withdrawals take you down to your minimum balance.
It will continue to monitor your checking account for deposits so it can transfer the necessary funds. If you encounter an emergency and need to access the funds in your Debitize account, you may request a transfer back to your checking account.
Although the program discourages this unless necessary. Debitize will not work for individuals with a serious spending or credit problem since your credit card will not be declined at the register if you do not have sufficient funds in your checking account. But for the average consumer, Debitize can be a great program for avoiding credit card debt, while still enjoying the perks of credit cards. Pros: Debitize allows users to have the best of both the debit and credit card world.
You save money in credit card interest by always paying your bill in full, while still reaping your credit card rewards and protections. Cons: Those who consistently struggle with overspending will not be helped by the Debitize model. Fees: None for the basic program. The Credit Optimizer option costs $3/month, although you can try it free for a month. Best For: Consumers who are able to responsibly use debit cards, but struggle with credit. To learn more and get started with Debitize, visit AccountMe Large corporations use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in their bookkeeping–so why shouldn’t individuals do the same? GAAP allows for efficient, comprehensive, and consistent accounting, which would be a boon to the average budgeter.
Offers users a customizable GAAP accounting framework that allows you to view, edit, and budget your finances using the same double-entry bookkeeping as multi-national corporations. This means users will have an incredibly accurate view of their finances. AccountMe describes itself as just like corporate accounting, with a few twists. Specifically, tracking your expenses in a personal budget needs a little more nuance than traditional GAAP accounting allows. So AccountMe divides your expenses into three categories: Necessary Fixed Expenses, Necessary Variable Expenses, and Discretionary Expenses. For users who are familiar with GAAP accounting, AccountMe offers an easy-to-use budgeting app that will dovetail with their accounting knowledge and provide a comprehensive view of their money.
According to their website, AccountMe will soon be offering features to link to bank accounts and credit/debit cards to allow automatic population of your expenses. Pros: Having a customizable GAAP accounting platform as an app on your smartphone is a major boon for anyone already familiar with GAAP. Cons: If you do not already know GAAP, it is not necessarily easy to learn from a smartphone app. This is only available for Apple. Cost: The AccountMe website is no longer functioning, although you can still download the app from the iTunes App store. It is unclear how much the app costs based on the information available on iTunes. When the website was still active, there were three levels, starting at $9.99 per month for the basic platform, $24.99 for the mid-level, and $49.99 for the highest level (nicknamed the Gordon Gekko level, which indicates the creators of AccountMe have a sense of humor).
To learn more and get started with AccountMe, visit. Budget Software Graveyard Change (While Change is still active for current users, it is not accepting new registrations. You can enter your email to be notified when it begins accepting new users again). The founders of Change started with a simple idea: the best way to influence people to save is to spark behavioral change.
After all, consumers have 100% control over what they spend and save, and yet they do not necessarily make the best decisions for themselves. So the Change virtual finance assistant, unlike other apps and programs on this list, does not automatically change your saving or spending habits. What it does is alert you to those habits and give you choices for how to make changes. Here’s how it works. When you sign up with Change–which the creators describe as an “invisible” app, since there is no app icon on your device–you link your bank and credit card accounts to the program, which anonymizes and encrypts your information for your security.
Once your accounts are linked, Change analyzes your spending habits to find bad financial behavior. It then sends you text messages to alert you to behavior you may be unaware of and suggests simple ways to change the behavior. For instance, you might receive a message alert pointing out that your $14.95 per month Audible subscription costs you $179.40 per year. Or Change may text you to let you know your top spending category for the previous month was $200 in coffee shops, where you never spent more than $15 at a time. Those little nudges can help you become more aware of your spending habits without asking you to drastically alter your lifestyle. Change offers suggestions for how to reduce such costs so that you can seamlessly reduce spending without feeling deprived. Change also offers an automated savings algorithm that moves small amounts of money to a Change savings account.
This way, as you learn to curb your spending, you can instantly see how it boosts your savings. In addition, Change labs is also piloting a Predictive Overdraft Protection program. This program will make use of Change's predictive capabilities to alert customers five days in advance of a possible overdraft event and its consequences. If you want to avoid the overdraft, you will be able to hit accept and Change will extend you a short-term loan, with funds automatically added to your account within two business days. The pricing for loans through the Predictive Overdraft Protection™ are dramatically lower than overdraft fees. Paying off your loan will be easy and painless, as the amount you owe will be slowly deducted from your account over several days once your account balance allows it. Pros: Change is all about teaching users to be mindful spenders, which is the kind of long-term lesson that all consumers need to learn.
There is no expectation that you will completely give up the spending habits that make you happy. These concepts are based on solid research in behavioral economics. Cons: Change currently only supports financial institutions in the U.S. Fees: None. Best for: Change’s creators are specifically targeting 25-35 year old Millennials, although anyone who is looking for more insight into their spending habits would get a lot out of this virtual financial assistant. To learn more and sign up for notifications when they are accepting new customers, visit Hip Money (Though the website claims that the Hip Money app is available, it cannot be found on either the iTunes store or on Google Play) Imagine you had a financially savvy best friend who you could fold up and put in your pocket.
He’d do all the calculations you’d need to figure out how to reach your goals (with his tiny pocket calculator), suggest an amount of money you could set aside every day to reach those goals, and give you itty bitty high-fives when you saved money. The app Hip Money is that financial best friend. When you sign up with Hip Money, you securely link it to your checking, savings, banking, and/or loan accounts so the program can understand your spending habits. From there, you will. Once a day, the app will ping you with a personalized daily savings recommendation.
This is an amount of money that the program has determined you can safely set aside based upon the money you have coming in and going out. The really exciting feature of Hip Money is that it will show you how much that daily savings recommendation will be worth depending on where you send it.
For instance, if you are saving up for a trip to Cabo in a savings account, the $5.55 the app recommends that you put aside will be worth $5.89 with the small amount of interest you earn. If you send the $5.55 to your student loan, it could save you $29.78 over the life of the loan.
And if you put that $5.55 in your retirement account, it will grow to be worth $67.91 by the time you retire. Once you have decided where to send your savings, a simple swipe will send the money to your selected account, and the app then applauds you for making progress on your goals. Pros: The app is designed to help you reach your goals without asking you to sacrifice your priorities or make drastic changes to your spending habits. It’s all about making saving money easy. Cons: It’s not entirely clear how the program determines a safe amount for you to save each day, nor what safeguards are in place to protect you from a potential overdraft.
Cost: Once Hip Money launches, the app will cost $18 per year. Level Level (Level is no longer active) The Level Money app syncs with your bank account and determines how much will be left in that account after automatically deducting upcoming bills, recent purchases, and your savings goals. It then gives you an estimate of the amount of money that’s safe for you to spend over the next day, week, and month. Since Cashpath offers you a single dashboard to see all of your transactions, it’s a great tool for anyone who struggles to keep track of their cash flow. The attractive and easy-to-use interface will make budgeting something you look forward to doing. Though it is not yet available, the creators of Cashpath intend to have the app eventually offer options for doing the savings for you.
It is not clear if that will be set up to be completely automatic, or if it will require input from you. Pros: This is a gorgeous and easy-to-use interface.
The program offers a simple method for on-the-go budgeting for individuals who break out in hives at the idea of a spreadsheet. Cons: The program is still new, and not all of the potential options are available yet.
Cost: Free Unsplurge Unsplurge (Unsplurge is no longer active) Would-be savers who would like some community encouragement will love Unsplurge. This iPhone app asks you to choose a goal and upload a picture of your goal. Once you have set your goal, it can then be shared with “Town,” which is the community platform for Unsplurge, where users can see others’ savings goals and cheer each other on. You (and Town, if you choose) will get to see your progress as you put money aside for your goal.
Unsplurge is not synced with your bank, so it is up to you to actually save the money. However, the app is designed to help you create and maintain a habit, using both community and personal motivation to keep you on track. In addition, the app offers savings tips, such as a, to help you get into the savings frame of mind. Pros: Both the progress bar and the community aspect of Unsplurge can be very motivating and help you to establish a habit of saving money. Cons: Unsplurge does not help you budget or identify money that it is safe to put aside in savings. Also, the app is only available on the iPhone. Fees: None.
Best For: Those who are comfortable with budgeting but need additional motivation to save money. Penny Penny (Penny is no longer active) What if you had a money-savvy friend who could look over your finances, put the information into an easy-to-read graph, and even give you financial advice? That’s the idea behind the newly released Penny 2.0, the personal finance app that feels as easy as texting with a really helpful friend.
After you sync the app with your bank, each time you open it Penny will greet you and allow you to respond with a choice of several pre-written questions. Penny’s answers will help you better understand your current financial picture, and improve how you are spending your money. Penny will let you know when you have bills coming up and will forecast where you'll be at the end of the month if you continue spending in the same way. New with this version, the app helps you understand if you're getting your money's worth from subscriptions and will help you cancel them. Penny 2.0 will also alert you to any data breaches that might affect you, so that you can be on alert for suspicious activity. Finally, Penny offers you a more traditional breakdown of your finances so you can choose to dig into the specifics of your financial life. Pros: This easy to use app takes a great deal of the intimidation out of finance.
In addition, Penny’s pre-written questions allow new budgeters to know what to ask even if they would otherwise be confused. Cons: The pre-written questions might be annoying to a more advanced budgeter. Fee: None. Best For: Beginning budgeters. Do you have a favorite financial app?
What do you love about it? When a user is required to sign up to the company web site and hand over his/her account numbers, user name, password etc it raises a major concern about security and data usage. I believe that perhaps private information should remain private and not stored or viewed by anyone else than the actual owner of the information. That is why i use Geltbox Money – it doesn’t use any third party Aggregation site. Moreover, Geltbox is the only personal finance software that has the ability to work with any financial institution in the world.
Get Back Hours Per Week Discover how to improve your workflows and get more focus with this free, in-depth guide to productivity. In fact, when we ran our survey asking what app or service people currently used, the number one response — despite our attempt to nail down the 8 most popular options — was Other with 34.7%. This illustrates two things:.
budgeting is very personal, and. the ecosystem is very broad People are just as passionate about their budgeting software as they are about their artisanal to-do list apps. Everyone has their own system that works for them. That also means that what works for me may not work for you, but we did notice that successful financial management systems seem to all share a few common characteristics:. The ability to add transactions quickly and seamlessly. The ability to import/sync bank and credit card statements. The ability to review accounts and financial status at a glance.
![Home budget for mac Home budget for mac](http://www.gadgetreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IMG_0115-1024x768.png)
You will find these key features at the heart of just about every personal finance app. The difference is usually in how they are implemented, and in this review we compared them side-by-side to see what workedand what didn’t. Budgeting Software? BORING Say the word “budgeting” in public and you can quickly find yourself eating lunch alone. But despite the fact that it can be uncomfortable to talk about, it’s one of those things that needs to be done. As Benjamin Franklin once said” “If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail!” When it comes to your financial future, failing to budget is setting yourself up for failure. One of the quickest ways to run out of money is to not have a plan for how you’re going to spend it.
And if you want to improve your plan for how you manage your money, you have to first know how you’re currently spending it. In the past, this meant that you had to spend hours collecting old statements and cross-checking a spreadsheet that you had to meticulously maintain yourself.
Fortunately, there are quite a few great software options available to make the job a lot quicker and easier. Budgeting 101 Despite the thousands of books and blogs dedicated to the task, when you get down to it, budgeting is quite personal — it’s just you and your money. Hopefully you have a system that works already, but if you’ve never done a budget before, you need to. You need to plan for the future and the rainy days that will come your way. Even though budgeting can be one of the most stressful aspects of financial planning (especially if you already feel overwhelmed as you watch the bills pile up), it’s vitally important to your financial health. It’s important that we have a firm grasp on the concept of budgeting before we can accurately evaluate personal finance apps.
We asked, a CPA in California, to help us define budgeting and what he believes a budgeting app should do. The Sweet Setup: Do you recommend that people use a budgeting app to manage their finances? Andrew Carroll: Absolutely. Budgeting is all about data. The better your data, the better your decisions will be. Spending time collecting and processing data, however, does not add much value. Let the computers do that work.
TSS: What advice would you give someone budgeting for the first time? Double your expected expenses. You spend a lot more money than you think you do. From another perspective: Don’t worry about getting the numbers perfect, especially right out the gate. The fact that you did ANYTHING is good. This is just like exercise.
You cannot expect to be a hard body CrossFit hero because you spent all day Saturday working out. Being a master at something requires that you build a habit of doing it all the time. There is no shortcut to 10,000 hours. So spend a little time, each week, and build the habit. Before you know it, you will have an awesome grip on how the money in your world works. TSS: What, if any, differences exist between budgeting and financial planning?
HUGE difference. Budgeting is about your income and expenses, or inflows and outflows.
It is all about managing your personal income statement. Financial planning, primarily, is about managing your balance sheet. How do we deal with our existing assets and liabilities to maximize our net worth. Budgeting becomes an input for financial planning since “profit” (or money earned over what you spent) becomes savings, which should be directed into one of your assets or to one of your liabilities as per the financial plan.
TSS: What is the most misunderstood aspect of budgeting? That the point of budgeting is to get all the numbers accounted for. My favorite mantra at my office, which, ask my staff, I repeat ad naseum, is “It’s not about the numbers.” Which is an odd thing to say in an office full of number crunchers, right?
But it gets right to the heart of the issue. If you think the purpose of budgeting is to make sure that all the numbers get in their proper box, you missed the point. The point of budgeting is to understand, generally, how your money is being spent and where it’s going. You probably only need 90 – 95% accuracy in your budgeting to get a good idea of where the money went. The point of budgeting is to get information — information that you can act on and make good choices with. TSS: How have free apps like Mint influenced public perception when it comes to budgeting?
I would answer this two ways, the optimist and the “realist”: Optimist: People now realize that, and this is not exclusive to budgeting per se, any activity that used to be cumbersome because of the data manipulation involved, is no longer so. Budgeting apps, and our internet connected world, has allowed people to do more because they remove those data manipulation burdens. Realist: As a general rule, people are pretty dumb when it comes to money. They tend to make emotional decisions and let their behaviors be guided by psychological factors, not data-driven factors.
That was true 100 years ago when we had no computers and will continue to be true 100 years from now when we fill in our budgeting apps by blinking our eyes. People will always be people. TSS: What features do you believe are most important to a budgeting app? The second most import would be importing. The ability to import cleanly and easily.
If you can’t give the app the username and password for all your bank and credit card accounts and have it go scoop the data for you, don’t bother with it. All you have done is make budgeting a data entry job for yourself and you will fail at it because no one likes doing data entry. TSS: How do budgeting / accounting apps help people when it’s time to do taxes? If your return is a normal W-2 only return, not much.
But that is because we don’t need much data from you. If you have a business, a little bit of work each week means taxes are a breeze. Do a little work here and there and at year end, you can do a corporate and personal tax return in 40 minutes flat. It even leaves time for lunch and beers. Which would you rather have? Lunch and beers, or a two-hour tax appointment?
TSS: What resources would you recommend to people looking to improve their budgeting habits? The single best resource is your time and attention. 20 minutes a week from you will make a bigger impact than any other app, program, service, or professional. With that being said, I recommend whatever app, service, or idea helps you spend that 20 minutes and build that habit. Further Reading If you want a little bit more foundational knowledge on the topic before we dive in to the applications themselves, here are a couple of notable finance blogs:. For help getting out of debt and getting off the ground with budgeting and investing, we also highly recommend,.
The Candidates Now that we’ve established the ground rules for creating and maintaining a budget, we can start diving in to some of the applications we looked at to help people reach their financial goals. There are several candidates we’ll be evaluating:.
(formerly iBank). Side note: some of these are native Mac apps, but some of them are online services. In selecting the best personal finance app, we want to take into consideration all of the possible software and service-based options for people to use when tracking finances on their Mac. Since there are some very strong service-based options available, this review would be incomplete if we neglected to take services like Mvelopes, YNAB, EveryDollar, and Mint into consideration.
The Criteria Most of the applications we looked at fall into one of two camps in how they approach financial management and are usually very good at one of two things:. Showing you where your money went (reporting). Helping you tell your money where to go (budgeting) The very best personal finance apps strike a balanced approach between these two extremes. We’ve spent quite a bit of time putting many popular personal finance apps to the test and will be judging them subjectively using the following criteria:. Ease of Use – Managing your personal finances is difficult enough without having an application interface that works against you instead of for you.
The app or service that you choose to use needs to make it easy to navigate to and find the information that you need, when you need it. Overall Design – The personal finance app you decide to use should also be well-designed. This goes hand-in-hand with being easy to use, but some of the apps we looked at definitely had an extra coat of polish that made them much more inviting and enjoyable to use. Ability to Import/Sync Transactions – As Andrew said, this is a critical feature for making sure that your financial information is up to date. Some apps pull in all your transactions automatically, which makes it easier to reconcile your accounts and makes sure your information is current, but can also skim over the actual impact of your transactions.
Some apps are built around the philosophy of “feeling the pain” of every transaction. We’ll try to take this into consideration and point it out where necessary. The Ecosystem – While this article is written through the lens of our favorite personal finance app for the Mac, we realize that not all financial management activity will take place there. In fact, our survey showed that only 46% of respondents preferred to track expenses on their Mac.
Since the right tool for the job is the one that you have with you, we also take into consideration the other platforms these tools exist on and the ease with which the data syncs between them. Reporting Options and Data Consumption – A very important aspect of personal finance management is being able to step back from the transaction level and look at the big picture.
Graphs and charts that display macro-level information (i.e. End-of-year reports and tracking spending over time) can be very useful in identifying spending habits, tracking investments, etc. Goal Setting/Management Tools – Some personal finance apps have tools to help you go above and beyond basic budgeting needs and allow you to set and achieve financial goals. These can be very useful, but also require a bit more understanding and add some complexity to the application (but when implemented correctly, it’s totally worth it).
Customer Support/Coaching – There is monetary value in having the peace of mind that comes with knowing that there is a friendly and helpful support staff ready to assist you if something breaks. Some services/apps take this a step further and also offer additional coaching/training options to not only support the software they develop, but also to educate their customers on basic money management and budgeting principles so they are ultimately more successful with their finances.
Accessibility – If you live outside the USA & Canada, there’s a pretty good chance your financial institution might not be supported. Some personal finance apps offer much better support in this area than others, but if you find yourself in a situation where you use a non-North American bank, your options might be limited. We try to take this into account when picking our recommended personal finance application. Price – While most personal finance apps are built on the same core principles, they are not all priced similarly. Some applications offer additional features, so you’ll have to weigh whether that additional functionality justifies the additional cost. Our Favorite Personal Finance App for Mac: Banktivity is the right blend of powerful features and ease-of-use to help just about anyone improve how they manage their personal finances. Importing transactions is a breeze, and it offers flexible budgeting tools to help you stay on track and make sure you meet your financial goals.
And with the release of version 6, it’s even better. The Banktivity Dashboard has been updated for version 6 and looks a little bit cleaner, but it still offers easy access to all of your financial information. A sidebar on the left gives you access to your accounts, budgets, reports, and even websites for when you need to confirm transaction details from within the app. From the sidebar, you can also quickly access scheduled transactions, categories, tags, accounts, securities, and even currencies by clicking the Settings icon in the bottom-left. The summary of your financial health has been moved to the Summary in the main window, which keeps the sidebar looking tidy.
The main window displays the selected information, like your transactions or your budgeting categories. This information changes based on which sidebar item you have selected, but the sidebar remains in place throughout your interaction with the app so you can quickly jump to the different parts of the application with ease. One of the new additions in Banktivity 6 is the introduction of Workspaces, which significantly extends the functionality of this main window. Workspaces allow you to use any account, budget, report, or other view in Banktivity side-by-side. This allows you to work in two parts of the app at once and is completely customizable. There are two ways to create a Workspace:. Drag an item from the sidebar onto the right edge of the window.
Hold down the option key when viewing a report or budget and click an item to drill down. At first glance, this may not seem revolutionary, but it’s actually incredibly useful. For example, you may want see an account register next to your budget to see how your spending affects your budget. Or if you need to verify something in your bank website, you can drag the website over from the sidebar next to your account register.
Importing/Syncing Accounts Banktivity makes it really easy to import and sync data online. You can sync data using one of three methods: Direct Download, web download (through an in-app browser window), and IGG Software’s own “Direct Access” that includes unlimited syncing between accounts and devices for a $40 yearly fee. While we had some trouble syncing certain types of accounts in previous versions of iBank, this seems to be largely resolved with the release of Banktivity. When testing the new version, we encountered zero issues using Direct Access. While Direct Download is free and may serve your needs if your bank supports it (and you live in North America), Direct Access is a private sync service that can actually access “thousands of banks worldwide,” so it’s a great option if your bank isn’t located in the US or Canada, or doesn’t support Direct Download. Banktivity also offers support for many different types of accounts. Checking, savings, cash, credit cards, loans, assets, liabilities, lines of credit, money market, investments, and 401k accounts can all be managed in Banktivity.
Managing all of these things in one place is convenient because it can give you a more complete financial picture. Managing Accounts Managing accounts with Banktivity is easier than just about any other app we tested. While it’s not the prettiest user interface, the learning curve in Banktivity is very manageable. There’s a lot of attention to detail here that makes it easy to get up and running. For example, if you have multiple transactions from the same payee and you change the category on one transaction, Banktivity will ask you if you want to change it for the other transactions as well. This may not seem like a huge thing, but it’s very important that you categorize your transactions correctly in whichever application you decide to use.
If you don’t, your reports will not be very useful because you won’t be able to discern where or how you’re spending money. In order to accurately identify trends and really know if you are hitting your financial targets, you have to do some setup work. Fortunately, Banktivity remembers these values once you put them in, so after you do it once it makes it much simpler in the future. Banktivity also syncs all your accounts automatically if you are using Direct Access or Direct Download, so they are always up-to-date — no need to manually refresh your accounts.
Another new feature in Banktivity 6 is the addition of tags, which is kind of like next-level categorization. These can be very useful in helping you track your spending accurately because they allow you to pull up reports for spending that are cross-categorical. Tags are different than categorization, and allow you to see the big picture. For example, let’s say you went on vacation and you had several expenses across several categories:. You went out to eat (Dining). You got groceries (Food).
You saw a show (Entertainment). You took a taxi/ride share to the show (Travel) You can probably see the problem here — there’s no way to pull out the vacation transactions from everything else.
The solution is to use tags. For example, if you use a #vacation tag on your vacation expenses, you can easily access a report based on that tag to see all your vacation expenses together. Reports The reporting tools in Banktivity were already top-notch, but they’ve been revamped in version 6 and are one of our favorite features of the app. There are many different types of reports available in Banktivity:.
Income and Expense. Net Worth. Expense Timeline. Category Detail. Portfolio Summary. Investment Summary. Payee Summary.
Categorized Payee. U.S. Tax. Debt/Liability. Forecast For any of these reports, you can choose which accounts you want to include in the reports, and you can select from a number of pre-defined or custom date intervals.
You can create just about any report you can imagine inside of Banktivity, and if you’ve taken the time to categorize your spending, you can get this information quickly and easily. In addition to providing a lot of detail, Banktivity’s reports are also interactive. Instead of just showing that you spent $1,000 going out to eat last month, you can actually click on that section of the report and see all the transactions that meet that criteria. This allows you to really dig in and better comprehend how your money is being spent (all those $6 lattes add up). And if all these detailed reports weren’t enough, reports got even easier in Banktivity 6 with the addition of Quick Reports.
Quick Reports allow you to instantly drill down into transaction categories and view reports on everything inside. To access Quick Reports when looking over transactions, just click Report On and select a category to access the custom report, then click the three vertical bars at the top of the report and drag it to the sidebar so you can keep tabs on it. For example, if you want to see how much you spend on fancy coffee, you can view the report by the category and then just drag the report to the sidebar.
Now you can access the report again at anytime from the sidebar simply by clicking it, making it easy to track your hipster caffeine cravings. IOS Apps Banktivity does have iOS apps, but you have to purchase them separately.
While the is free, the is $19.99 and the is $64.99. That means that it is almost $85 just to access your information on all your devices, and that doesn’t include the additional purchase of the Direct Access add-on.
The iOS apps are well-designed and sync easily with the Mac version using your Banktivity Cloud Sync ID. You can use the app to access just about anything you can in the Mac version. There’s a big button to quickly add a transaction, but it’s a very full-featured app that allows you do a lot of what you can do in Banktivity for the Mac while you’re on the go. Get Back Hours Per Week Discover how to improve your workflows and get more focus with this free, in-depth guide to productivity. The Best App for Budgeting Newbies: You Need a Budget (YNAB) A lot of people were upset when switched to a subscription-based pricing model. I was one of those who audibly groaned when YNAB announced they were moving to a subscription model, but I see that it is pretty easy to justify the $5/month (or $50/year) expense. In fact, YNAB says on their homepage that the average YNAB user saves over $200 the first month and over $3,300 the ninth month.
If you’re not sure it will work for you, they offer a free trial so you can try it out. Given YNAB’s goal of helping you save more money, this is one app that easily justifies the price they ask consumers to pay on a regular, ongoing basis. YNAB applies a digital version of to personal budgeting, so if you don’t like that approach, you probably won’t like YNAB. If you’ve tried it before and never gotten it to work for you, YNAB offers many training resources to help make your system “sticky,” including live classes and several helpful training guides to help you give every dollar a job. The new web app does a great job of guiding you through setting up everything from your very first budget, planning a month ahead, setting long-term savings goals, and more. In short, they not only give you the tools to manage your money successfully, they’ll walk you through it step-by-step. This makes YNAB a great starting point for people just dipping their toes into the personal finance waters as it is incredibly easy to use.
YNAB can import bank transactions, but it doesn’t automatically download and categorize them the way other services like Mint or applications like Quicken do. This is a little bit more inconvenient, but it’s by design as YNAB requires you to manually approve each transaction. The reasoning for this is that they want you to “feel” the impact of each transaction. It’s easy to get in the habit of just swiping your credit card, and manually entering transactions into YNAB makes it painfully obvious what you’re spending your hard-earned money on. YNAB has a companion iOS app that’s free and is great for manually entering transactions since that’s at the heart of the YNAB model.
Both the web app and the iOS app are very well-designed, but the number of banks that YNAB will sync with is limited. There’s a good chance that if you use banks outside the US or Canada that YNAB may not be able to import your transactions for you, which makes it much more difficult to use and maintain. Other Software-Based Options MoneyWiz Of all the apps we looked at, is easily the most beautiful (even with the improvements to the Banktivity dashboard with version 6).
It looks and feels like a native Mac app (it even has TouchBar support), but lacks some of the more powerful features that are in our favorite app, Banktivity. One major plus for MoneyWiz is the accessibility for international readers. Many personal finance apps support “hundreds of banks” using the OFX format, but MoneyWiz supports over 16 thousand banks in over 40 countries. For our readers outside the United States & Canada (regions most other apps are limited to), that makes MoneyWiz a very strong option (and maybe your only option). MoneyWiz also has a unique pricing structure as you can choose to either buy the application outright or subscribe monthly to receive free updates. The standalone version of MoneyWiz is $24.99 for the Mac version and $4.99 for either iOS or Android, but to unlock online banking it’s an additional $4.99/month or $49.99/year. Major updates (i.e.
MoneyWiz 3) are paid updates for the purchased version. The alternative is to download an ad-based, free version of MoneyWiz, and if you decide to upgrade (which you’ll need to do to unlock online banking), it’s slightly more expensive than with the paid version ($5.99/month, $59.99/year). With a subscription, though, you don’t have to pay for individual versions and can download whatever version you’d like for free. Once you’ve downloaded a new version, just log in with your credentials to upgrade. And lastly, MoneyWiz is now part of the SetApp service, so if you are willing to pay the $9.99/month fee you can get access to MoneyWiz and a bunch of other awesome apps as well (like Ulysses, ).
IFinance is a full-featured personal finance app from German developers, Synium Software. This app has been around awhile, and it shows in the refinement and attention given to even the smallest details. It’s a very mature and well-thought-out application, and the feature set shares a lot in common with Banktivity. IFinance even has some additional features that Banktivity lacks, and for German Mac users it offers built-in support for German banks using the Financial Transaction Services (FinTS) protocol. Even though version 4 of iFinance now supports the OFX format and can sync with hundreds of US banks, it’s still significantly less than the thousands available using the Direct Access service in Banktivity.
The reports are also not as in-depth as Banktivity (the interactive reports in Banktivity were by far the best we saw in our testing). IFinance is a strong option for budgeting on the Mac, and if you want more customization options you should definitely give it a look.
It takes a little-bit-different approach to how data is displayed, but gives you more flexibility as well. Moneydance, by The Infinite Kind, is another full-featured native Mac app that has been around for awhile.
A couple of the reviews featured on their website were actually published in 2005 and 2007 respectively, and The Infinite Kind have built on the solid foundation of the app which now offers features like online banking and bill pay. The user interface is nice, but we didn’t like the layout quite as much as Banktivity. It does offer more widgetized areas to provide you additional financial information (like exchange rates), but some of this may be unnecessary. There’s a lot of reports available that offer some level of additional detail (a pop up will show you the contents of a category when you hover over it with the cursor, for example), but they’re still not as nice and don’t offer the full control of the interactive reports in Banktivity. One very interesting feature of Moneydance is the, which allows developers to extend the Moneydance functionality and use the information from Moneydance in creative ways.
They even offer some sample Python scripts on their developer page. If you really want to tinker with how things work under the hood, Moneydance gives you that ability. MoneyWell, by No Thirst Software, is a unique take on the digital envelope budgeting system. The premise of MoneyWell is simple:. Fill your expense buckets when you get paid.
Assign your spending to buckets. Stop spending when your buckets tip over. If you take the time to really figure out MoneyWell, it’s a really powerful application.
It does take awhile to set it up correctly, though, and it only has minimal support for investments. If you want to track something besides basic savings/checking accounts and credit cards, it’s not really the app for you.
It’s great for budgeting and the reporting tools are solid, but if you want to track investments you’ll have to do that elsewhere. Quicken is one of the most popular finance and budgeting apps of all time, used by millions of people to manage both personal and professional finances on a daily basis for years. Odds are you’ve seen or used Quicken before in either a personal or professional capacity. Unfortunately, Quicken for Mac disappoints in many ways.
Many of the features that Quicken pioneered are now available in other Mac apps and are often implemented much better. Quicken 2018 for Mac is now only available as a, and it feels clunky and cumbersome to use. With Quicken 2018, you can only download the app directly from Quicken’s website. Previous versions of Quicken for Mac were riddled with bug reports in the Mac App Store reviews, and the iOS version of the app is currently rated at less than two stars. Range from $34.99 per year (“Starter”), $49.99 per year (“Deluxe”), or $74.99 per year (“Premier”), and all offer different levels of features. Since Quicken 2018 is fairly new, the Deluxe and Premier tiers are currently 40% off for a limited time. Quicken also has a history of forcing people to upgrade versions (which is unavoidable now with a subscription model), and it seems like these upgrades often create problems.
This is unacceptable when you’re talking about people’s financial data, especially given that the Quicken developers control the standard data type that the software uses. In our opinion, it’s inexcusable that one version of Quicken data wouldn’t import successfully to an upgraded version (even as recent from 2015 to 2016) when other third-party apps are able to import it without issue in our testing. Quicken 2018 has some nice features like online bill pay (which requires the top level “Premier” subscription) and the ability to export your data to TurboTax, but technical issues seem common. This wouldn’t be so terrible if they had phenomenal support to help you fix things, but we found customer support lacking as well. One user reported an average wait time of 60 minutes for phone support, and 30 minutes for even basic chat support. Quicken does offer a 30-day money back guarantee, however, if you want to give it a shot. Other Cloud-Based Options There are quite a few web services to choose from, and more are added every day.
Cloud-based personal finance software can provide easier access to your financial data since you can log in securely from any web browser and you’re not tied to a specific access point. For people who move around a lot and need to access their data from multiple devices or locations, this can be a better option than standalone software as all your settings and preferences will sync with you. Here are our impressions of a couple of the more notable ones. EveryDollar is a new online option created by financial guru Dave Ramsey. It has a great user interface and allows you to manage Dave Ramsey’s “debt snowball” approach, but it does have some downsides.
For one thing, if you don’t want to manually enter each and every transaction by hand, it’s very expensive. While EveryDollar Basic is free, if you want to import bank and credit card information into the app, it requires the Plus version (which is $99/year).
This is significantly more expensive than almost every other option out there, and the cost is not justified in our opinion. Mint actually does this for free, and even with the full purchase price of our recommended native Mac app (Banktivity) and the optional yearly Direct Access fee to automatically import transactions ($39/year), it’s still less than one year of EveryDollar Plus. Mint is the ultimate tool for the “knowing where your money went” crowd. It’s free, and because it’s owned by Quicken, it can get around charging for direct access to financial institutions. This is great when it works, but, unfortunately, it’s fairly common for accounts to become “disconnected.” When this happened in our testing, the way to fix it is to go back in and re-configure them in order to get them working again. This can be a bit of a pain, but it’s not a huge deal.
Mint does offer a bunch of great features for managing your finances online. Mint’s budgeting tools have become significantly better over the years and are very easy to use. The app also offers customized tips for helping you reduce fees and save money.
Mint can even send you alerts for unusual account charges if you’d like. Everything Mint offers is completely free, so if you are looking for the cheapest option to get started with budgeting, this is it. Mint’s mobile apps are very well-designed and also provided for free. You might be wondering how Mint makes money if everything it offers is free. Mint actually sells your aggregate financial (not individual data) to third parties and uses it to provide customized offers as a way of helping you save money. When they recommend a service and you sign up for it, they get a referral fee.
Since no private data is shared and the Mint servers are secure, this isn’t really a big deal in our opinion, but just know what you’re getting into. If you get annoyed with “ads” (even ones that can help you save more money), you might not like Mint, but that’s how they keep the lights on. Personal Capital is a very strong online offering with a very straight-forward, two-part business model:.
A free personal finance aggregator that shows you all your information. A paid advisory service to help you manage your money. The free tools are very powerful, and include features like budgeting tools, a retirement planner, and even a 401(k) fee analyzer.
The personal tools are easy to use and well-designed, and there’s no need to use the paid advisory service if you don’t want or need to. In our experience with the app, we found almost no mention of the upsell, so you don’t have to worry about being bombarded with offers (obviously, that can change). Personal Capital has some great features, but it’s not for everybody. It has a heavy emphasis on tracking investment portfolios, so if all you’re looking to do is to create a basic budget, it might be overkill. Mvelopes Finicity’s is a web-based service that aims to help people get out of debt. Mvelopes helps you look at the future and manage your spending accordingly by strictly adhering to the envelope budgeting system (as the name implies).
Mvelopes has been updated and no longer offers a free plan, but all the paid plans do offer a 30-day free trial. The Basic edition is $4/month (or $40/year) and gives you unlimited accounts and spending envelopes. The Plus edition is $19/month (or $190/year) and gives you additional debt management tools and video training resources. The Premier edition is $95/month and is customized for individual needs, offering 1-on-1 coaching as well as phone support. The upgrades can be a bit pricey, but Mvelopes’s basic tier is more than enough for most users. While Mvelopes has both iOS and Android apps, it doesn’t have a Mac client. The web interface has been updated and no longer requires Flash to log in, but it’s still got a ways to go compared to the other cloud-based options on the list.
Conclusion Ultimately, the right personal finance application for you is the one that makes sense and is easy for you to use. The measure of effectiveness is the amount of time it saves you and how easily it integrates into your personal finance workflow.
For most people, is going to provide a full feature set and powerful reporting tools to help manage their money more effectively. And with the addition of Workspaces, Tags, and Quick Reports in version 6, Banktivity continues to lead the pack in innovative features while still being accessible and easy to use. For people just starting out, is a great option as it walks you through the budgeting basics and helps you start saving money right away. And if you rely on having access to international banks and neither of those will work for you, is a solid alternative with a great user interface and access to vastly more financial institutions than any other app we looked at.