Need to make sense of your budget, get a better grasp on your household spending, or simply check your credit score? We’ve tested and rated the top apps that help you keep track of your financial health.
We’re a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, and tens of thousands of Americans are still struggling with the hit to their personal finances. So, it’s important to know where you stand with your money, whether or not you’ve been affected so far. After all, no one can accurately predict where we’ll be in a month, six months, or a year. More than ever, you need to keep a close eye on your income, expenses, budget, and investments. There are many websites and desktop apps that help you understand your personal finances so you can make better, more informed decisions about spending. Many are free, and the rest are reasonably affordable. We review 11 of the best here. Critical Connections All the applications we reviewed have new features, but they share common characteristics. For example, most of them support online connections to your financial institutions. That is, you can download cleared transactions and other account data from your banks, credit card providers, brokerages, and other financial institutions, and see all of it neatly displayed in the applications’ registers. Typically, you simply enter your login credentials for those financial sites, though occasionally you have to provide additional security information. Once you import a batch of transactions, you will probably spend some time cleaning up the data. For example, transactions need to be correctly categorized as income (salary, freelance payment, and interest, for example) and expenses (food, mortgage, utilities, and so on). Most personal finance apps guess the appropriate categories, but you can always change it—and you can split transactions among different categories. If you’re conscientious about this, you’ll see charts and reports that accurately tell you where you’re earning and spending your money. This information can also be helpful when tax preparation time rolls around. Depending on the service, you might be able to add transaction tags. That way, you can search for transactions that are related in ways other than category assignments. You can add notes and attach files, too. If you bought something with cash, though, your bank won’t have a record of it. In those circumstances, you can manually create a transaction. CountAbout and others go a step further, providing additional tools that let you designate selected transactions as recurring, for example. Moneydance, too, is good at transaction management, but Quicken Deluxe tops all rivals. Quicken’s dashboard lets you see your income and expenses. A Different Kind of Dashboard Every service reviewed here has a dashboard, or home page, that you see when you first log in. Sometimes, the dashboard is the only screen you need to see, because it displays the most pertinent information about your financial situation, such as your account balances and pending bills. You see charts and graphs that tell you, for example, what your income is versus your spending, and how you’re doing on your budget. You may be able to set goals and gauge your progress at meeting them, as well as see live updates on your investment portfolio if markets are open. Basically, this overview shows you snippets and highlights of the data analysis these services do behind the scenes (with options to dive deeper). Click a checking account balance in Mint, for example, to go to the account’s register. Click your credit score in Credit Karma to learn what contributes to it and how it’s recently changed.
