Find out which mobile apps can help you improve your personal finances. The best apps for personal finances let you monitor your online accounts, keep your budget on track, and save money while you're on the go.
Money Girl
181 MG The Best Apps for Personal Finances
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If you have a smartphone or an iPad, you can download very inexpensive or free mobile applications or apps. Designed for your type of device. Need to track your budget on the go? There's an app for that. Want to find a coupon while you're shopping? Oh yes, there's an app for that too. In this podcast, I'll tell you about a few of the most popular personal finance apps. What they do, how much they cost, and how to use them wisely. I'll start by talking about two excellent financial apps that do something called account aggregation. If you're not familiar with account aggregation, it's a technology that collects the data from your various online accounts and reports it in one place. It automatically pulls up to the minute transactions from websites where you're already registered, such as your bank, credit card, brokerage, or auto lender, for example. Aggregation is really handy because it eliminates the need for you to log into multiple online accounts to see your transactions and balances. Instead, you can see everything you need on one screen. One of the best aggregation apps is from Mint.com. Once you create a free account at Mint, you can download their free mobile app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or for Android. The app gives you real-time balances and transaction details for each of your accounts. It shows how much you've spent in each spending category that you set up, so you know how much money is left in your budget. You can see the performance of your online investments and even add other assets like your home or car value to get a picture of your real-time net worth. The app syncs with your online Mint account, so you can use both the app and the web versions. Another impressive app that aggregates financial data is from pageonce@pageonce.com. They're the largest mobile personal finance service in the United States. Their app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is called pageonce personal finance. They also have apps for BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile called pageonce personal assistant. All the apps are free, but there's a premium version with no ads and more functionality that costs $6.99. The free versions give you real-time balances and transaction details for each of your online accounts. You can also get email reminders when your bills are due, as well as a variety of non-financial information. Pageonce gives you updates on your cell phone minutes, frequent flyer miles, loyalty program points, movies in your Netflix queue, ebay bids, feeds from your social networking accounts, and more. I haven't tried this app yet, but it sounds incredibly versatile. If you're not comfortable giving up your logon information to an aggregator or you don't have many online accounts to manage, you might enjoy a simpler app just to track your budget. Apps that don't automatically aggregate your data require that you enter your information as you go, but that's generally very easy to do. Phone budget is an app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad that allows you to track your account balances, bills, and budget. You can create reports, see trends with charts, attach photo images of receipts, and more. Regular version is $4.99, but you can also try out home budget light for free to see if you like it before buying the paid app. And speaking of buying stuff, there are some great apps that can help you save money. Here are three money-saving apps that are always working to bring you coupons, discounts, and deals. Shop savvy is a free app that turns an iPhone or an Android into a barcode scanner using the phone's camera. Then it searches the internet for the best price while you're browsing through the store. You'll know if you should buy the item in the store or if you could save money buying it online. Coupon Sherpa is a free app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad that helps you streamline your coupons. You can search for coupons and special offers by store name, product category, or at a store located nearest to you. Email the coupons to yourself, a friend, or just show them at checkout on your mobile device. Sugar is a free app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Blackberry, and Android. It has over 80,000 coupons, deals, discounts, and special offers from over 25,000 local and online merchants. You can search for offers by location and product category and even get alerts when your favorite stores have new coupons and discounts available. Before you download a ton of cool apps, read their descriptions carefully so you can be sure that they're going to help you. Start with one or two and see if you use them over the next few weeks. If so, then you can try out more. A major concern is safety and what could happen if you lose your mobile device. For most apps, you don't reveal or store anything confidential, like a bank account number or your social security number. Account aggregators like mint.com and page once have top-level security that's been proven safe. Their apps are password protected so no one else can open them and see your account transactions. But if someone were able to get in, they couldn't manipulate your information or see your username or password because the apps are in a read-only mode. If your mobile device is stolen, you can also go to the app's website and shut down your account completely. You can also set many mobile devices to lock after a certain period of time and require a password for re-entry, which is an added layer of protection. There are hundreds or probably thousands of financial apps and more are being created all the time. You can search for free or paid apps in the iTunes store or by doing a Google search for something specific, like mobile coupon apps. You'll find links to everything in the show on the blog at moneygirl.quickanddirtytips.com. If you or someone you know needs help organizing your personal finances and getting out of debt, be sure to download Money Girls Ten Steps to Adept Free Life. It's available as an audiobook at audible.com or on iTunes. But if you prefer to read it, now you can get the e-book version for just $3.99 for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, or in the Fiction Wise e-book store. I'd love to know if you have favorite mobile apps that are helping you improve your personal finances. Send me an email at money@quickanddirtytips.com, tweet me at @laraadems, or make a post on the Money Girl Facebook page so we can share them with the Money Girl community. I'm glad you're listening. 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