For the average person, these are still lean times, despite the incredible progress of technology and the fact that the last economic crisis was more than eight years ago.
When times are tough, it’s imperative that we manage our money as best as possible, and thanks to new technology, doing so has never been easier. There are now easy-to-use apps that help you manage everything from your monthly food budget to personal loans.
Let’s take a look at what these apps have to offer.
Smartypig
Perhaps the best thing about the Smartypig app is the fact that it is free, which is clearly an enormous boon for the people using it. After all, who wants to pay out a subscription to manage their money when they don’t have much in the first place?
As the name implies, Smartypig is an app that is dedicated to helping you save. But there’s a catch: you’ll have to open a savings account first associated with the company behind it. The good news is that opening that savings account also happens to be free, so you won’t be any more out of pocket than you were before.
The purpose of the app is to help people save for the things that they want, be it a house, a car or something else. Interest rates on Smartypig savings accounts earn 1 percent per year.
Expensify
Calculating all of your personal or business expenses can be a tiresome and time-consuming process. But now the app Expensify wants to change all that, allowing you to track things like your business expenses, all from a simple app. The app uses the GPS on your phone to calculate how far you’ve travelled and how many expenses you can claim back. GPS tracking is particularly helpful if you have to keep track of the mileage on a truck so that you can bill clients or save on corporation tax.
The app also means that you no longer have to hang on to physical receipts to prove that all of your expenses are in order. There’s a feature on the app that allows you to store and categorise them on your smartphone or tablet.
Mint
The biggest feature of Mint is that it allows you to collect data directly from your bank account and other personal accounts, giving you a real-time, automatic dashboard, displaying your financial situation. Mint is an excellent choice for people who are always on the go and who don’t have the time to manually enter all of their financial information into an app. Having that information on hand, as soon as you need it is extremely helpful and means that monthly budget planning is a lot easier.
Mint helps people to categorise their spending by group. It means that it’s easy to see where the majority of your money is going, whether it’s on rent, investments, bills or entertainment. There’s also a feature on the app that allows you to compare your spending to previous years, showing you how your habits have changed over time.
Image source: Wikimedia
