Proper money management is a good practice for college students. It helps them to track expenditures and avoid unnecessary spending. Rapid technological changes are influencing the way students manage their money.
The best budget apps can help you to categorize expenses and track spending. The aim is to connect with financial accounts and know where your money is going. The following money management apps have excellent features, which make them the best in 2022.
Table of Contents
YNAB
YNAB helps users to plan effectively and make informed financial decisions. It uses the zero-based budgeting approach to let your account for every dollar. Immediately after receiving a payment, you use the app to allocate the funds.
Decide how much should go toward expenses and savings. The goal is to instill financial discipline. From the app’s website, you can learn how to use the app and create a budget. I use this app to allocate funds to pay someone to do my assignment.
Every Dollar
This app offers a simple framework for zero-based budgeting. The basic version is free but to enjoy extra features, you need to enroll in the Ramsey+ subscription. The Ramsey+ membership includes additional features such as courses and audiobooks.
With the free version, you don’t need to sync accounts. You manually enter the money in and the money out throughout the month. This version also lets you set bill payment reminders and categorize important items.
Acorns
This is one of the best apps for investing. Many people think that they need a lot of money to begin investing. With the Acorns app, you can start with a few dollars.
Acorns rounds up the spare change from regular purchases and puts it into an investment portfolio. Thus, you can invest when buying your favorite drink from a coffee shop. The app allows depositing money without making purchases.
PocketGuard
PocketGuard is one of the best money management apps for simplified budgeting. It allows you to connect with your credit cards and bank accounts. It can also help you to manage your debts and track bills.
PocketGuard is also an excellent tool for tracking net worth. The app’s paid version has a debt-payoff plan, so you can export your transactions.
Rakuten
While in college, it may be difficult to escape some expenses such as groceries and books. Rakuten helps you to earn some cash from these essentials. It is both a browser extension and an app.
All you need to do is to connect the app with your debit or credit card. After buying something within the app’s network, you will receive a particular amount as cash back.
Goodbudget
Goodbudget uses envelope budgeting approach, making it an excellent app for planning finances. It allows you to portion out income toward specific categories of spending (called envelops).
This does not allow connecting to bank accounts. You need to add account balances manually and then assign funds toward envelopes. The app is accessible from the web or a smartphone. Whenever I want to hire someone to do my assignment, I create an envelope for that.
Mint
Mint has very high ratings on Google Play and the App Store. It syncs many accounts such as loans, credit cards, bills, savings, and investments. For actual budgeting, the app automatically categorizes your spending.
It allows you to personalize unlimited categories. Start by setting limits for the categories, and the app will alert you when approaching the limits. With Mint, you can save money, pay debts and track your financial goals.
Personal Capital
This is an investment app for tracking spending and wealth. The free version comes with features to enable you to track your spending. It allows you to monitor savings, credit card accounts, and checking.
Personal Capital lists transactions and offers a spending snapshot. You can customize the spending categories to see the monthly spending percentage per category. When I want to hire someone to write my assignment, I include the cost in my spending categories.
Fudget
If you are not looking to sync financial accounts, Fudget will be the best app. It comes with a calculator-esque and straightforward interface. With its simple design, you can create lists of money in and money out and track balances.
The pro account lets you export your budget and also comes with other extra features. The app’s Google Play rating is high, so it gets you covered.
Digit
Digit is an excellent app for saving money. It links to your bank account to automatically save small amounts of money. All you need to do is to specify the maximum amount you want to save daily.
You can also set your saving goals. If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, start saving for a better future.
Bonus App: Honeygain
Honeygain technically is not a budgeting app but rather a money-making app. However, let me tell you why it is perfect for saving money. Honeygain is a passive income app that will pay you in exchange for your unused internet bandwidth.
It is perfect since it doesn’t require any actions to be done besides downloading the app and registering. It runs in the background allowing you to do your usual activities.
The more bandwidth you share, the more credits you get, which you can then later cash out through PayPal or cryptocurrency.
Conclusion
Having money management apps is not everything. You also need to have good financial management practices. College is a great environment to build a strong financial foundation. Choose an app depending on your financial goals.
Read also: What to Teach Your Students About Money?