In this day and age, times are tough and this is why we need to save as much money as we can. When it comes to saving money, however, it is easier said than done. With bills needing to be paid, food needed to be bought, and certain emergency expenses coming out from time to time, there are many things we need to think about and do to be able to save money. Here are a few free personal finance apps to help you manage your money.
Mint
Mint is a free personal finance app available for Android, iPad, and iPhone and is a great way to be able to track spending as well as receiving. With this app made by Quicken Intuit,you will know where you money is coming from as well as where it is going. The best part about this app, except for the fact that it is free, is that it tracks everything automatically for you. All you have to do is put your information for your bank accounts in for it to track everything for you. It will draw everything from your personal bank accounts, savings accounts, retirement planning, college loans, and credit card accounts. This is a great app for those people who are too busy to put in each piece of information themselves. Mint will also put everything in categories for you including entertainment, food, bills, health and fitness, and more. Mint makes it easy to determine the amount you are spending and receiving month-to-month and year-to-year.
Expensify
Expensify will help you keep track of your business expenses. This free personal finance app allows you to keep track of business travel plans and will even compete with real time status updates for flights. It will also track mileage from the GPS included as well as log time for you to be able to bill clients. Expensify also has a feature called SmartScan that works with your smartphone by allowing you to take photos of your printed receipts which it then scans them to your phone. It will then store and categorize these receipts for you. Another great feature of this app is that it comes with something called SmartReports. SmartReports will automatically fill out excel spreadsheets for you so you don’t have to deal with them yourself. It is available for Android, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone.
Smarty Pig
Smarty Pig is inspired by its name and helps you save money. The only catch is that you do have to open a free Smarty Pig, FDIC insured savings account in order to use it. It allows for you to save money for the things you want to buy like a house or a car. However, you will need to attach another separate account to be able to get the money out of your Smarty Pig account. You can also make as many goals as you want with Smarty Pig. You can then use the app to share your goals with your friends and family through social networking. Smarty Pig also allows you to earn a certain amount of interest. This app is available for Android, iPhone, and iPad.