7 Free Ways to Monitor Your Spending
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3. Personal Capital
Personal Capital is the first free app on our list, and probably one of the easiest to use. It’s simple to track your spending, and even calculate your net worth using this app. All you need to do is connect your bank account and any investment accounts you have to the app. You can also add information about the value of your house or car to work out how much you hold in assets.
An advantage of this app is that it can track your spending habits as they happen. So, you won’t have to put in as much work as tracking spending yourself. On the app, your financial information is presented in neat and easy-to-read graphs. You’ll also receive email reports that detail how much you’ve spent that week. Another great perk is that you can use this app to make saving goals. You’ll be able to calculate an appropriate amount of your finances that you can stash away every month to make your savings grow.
4. Mint
Another great app that you can is Mint. It’s a pretty popular program, created by Intuit who are developers of budgeting software. Mint will be a fit for you if you need to cut your spending, but don’t know where to start. Tracking your outgoings is only the first step – what makes it effective is knowing exactly where you can save and when you can afford to splurge. A possible edge Mint has over Personal Capital is that you can use it to automatically pay your monthly bills – for free.
Mint is similar to the previous app in that you’ll need to connect your bank or investment account to it, but there is one difference. You can’t manually input information, instead, the data it gives you it’s taken from your real-time transactions.
5. Exact
Exact Finance is another app, and it’s brand-new. It hasn’t actually launched yet but promises to be a bit of a game-changer when it does. So, it’s still worth knowing about, even if you can’t download it right now.
Exact is a mixture of Mint and Personal Capital with the fact that it’s another app to link your financial accounts. It does all the same stuff, like tracking your spending and calculating your net worth. However, it will have an extra feature that both of the previous apps won’t.
This app calls itself futuristic because you’ll be able to use it to predict your spending patterns and saving trends. For example, if you want to make a get-out-of-debt plan, you can use Exact to figure out how long it will take, depending on how much or little you pay every month. These hypothetical variables allow you to view how having a larger amount of savings will affect your debt repayment plan or retirement savings account in a positive way.
