Best Home Budget Software For Mac

Managing your money is a complex skill, especially now that you no longer have to leave the house or even pull out your wallet in order to spend money. That’s why it is more important than ever for you to track spending. But the old-school methods of budgeting can be far too onerous for the new Millennium. Hardly anyone wants to be carrying an old-fashioned ledger book around with them to record financial transactions. Creating your own Excel spreadsheets sounds like the world’s worst homework assignment for some. That’s where personal finance budget software comes in.

There are many different budgeting and tracking programs available to help both beginning and veteran budgeters get a solid handle on their finances. Read our comprehensive list below to learn which program will work best for your financial situation. Quick Links to Budget Software Reviews: All-In-One Budget Software. Zero-Based Budget Software. Money/Budget Assistants. Other Budget Software.

Budget Software Graveyard. Change. Hip Money.

Penny.Most Popular.New All-In-One Budget Software Personal Capital One way to describe Personal Capital’s budgeting software is an “account aggregator.” This program allows you to track and understand every single penny in all of your financial accounts. Once you link up all of your various accounts, including your bank accounts, investments, mortgage, credit cards, and any other accounts, Personal Capital summarizes your finances and offers you basic investment guidance. Considering the fact that Personal Capital also tracks investments, it offers a more comprehensive (and free!) service than similar competitor Mint. On your dashboard, the program generates graphs and charts to help you better understand your financial picture, including the following:.

Net Worth. Account Balances.

Income Reports. Spending Reports. Asset Allocation.

Investment Returns. Projected Investment Fees Basic budgeting is also a snap with this program, as the interface gives you an understanding of all of your spending and account balances, and allows you to categorize your spending by date, merchant, and type of expense. The associated mobile app for iPhone and Android allows you to keep track of your budget even when you’re not at your computer. Personal Capital also offers a Retirement Planner tool that can help you build, manage, and forecast your retirement savings in the same place you handle your regular budgeting.

You can use the Investment Checkup feature that asks you to create a basic risk profile, pick a target retirement date, and your projected income sources, and the program will recommend a portfolio for you. Finally, there is a fee analyzer that can help you to understand the fees you are paying on you current investments. As with all other web-based personal finance programs, Personal Capital uses the same security and encryption you can expect from online banking. Pros: The most comprehensive aggregate of financial information, making this ideal for those with complex finances. Basic investment guidance is a major plus.

Cons: The program is not as customizable as some others—neither asset allocations nor spending categories are customizable. Cost: Free. See our. Learn more and get started with Clarity Money Clarity Money launched in January 2017, and was acquired by Goldman-Sachs in the spring of 2018.

Though it's still a relatively newcomer to this field, it has been quite the mover and shaker. The company’s mission is to offer a service that will both watch your back when it comes to your money choices, and help you take control of your financial life. The founders of the app believe that consumers deserve nothing less than transparency and advocacy in their financial choices, and they designed Clarity Money to provide it. After you download the app onto your Android, iPhone, or other Apple device, you then connect your accounts to Clarity, and the program analyzes your spending data before making suggestions to you on how you can optimize and save your money. Clarity Money is able to do this through their Bill Cancellation service, which identifies wasteful recurring charges and will cancel those services for you.

The site promises that Clarity will not make a recommendation that does not objectively improve your financial well-being, so you can feel secure that your finances will improve by acting on the app’s recommendations. There is also an algorithm on the app that will help you to find lower interest rate credit cards and/or personal loans. These sponsored products are how the app makes its money, but the site makes it clear that only the products or services that may be of interest to you will be shared with you. You can also through the app, which works with Experian and uses the VantageScore model. In addition to its basic money-saving tools, Clarity Money also allows you to set up automatic savings through a Marcus by Goldman Sachs high-yield savings account.

You can open this account with as little as $1, and set up an automatic recurring transfer for as little as $0.01 to receive the APY. Since everything is done within the app, creating and funding your savings account—not to mention pausing recurring withdrawals and closing the savings account—can all be accomplished with a couple of finger taps. The money in your Marcus high-yield savings account is FDIC insured up to $250,000.

It’s also important to note that the app will provide you with a daily summary of your spending, which includes automatic categorization of your purchases. A simple and easy-to-read daily breakdown of your spending habits will help you to improve those habits and take better care of your finances.

Pros: Clarity Money takes care of everything within the app, which makes it easy to act on their recommendations. The app offers a fairly global look at your money, helping you cancel unnecessary recurring expenses, save more money, and understand your money habits better. Cons: The automatic categorization of your purchases does not allow for split categorizations.

Fees: None. Clarity Money makes its money through the sponsored products and services suggested to users. You do not have to use any of the suggestions made to you. Best For: Newbie budgeters or anyone who wants their money management to be easy and all in one place. To learn more and get started with Clarity, visit.

Mint This OG free web-based personal finance tracker launched all the way back in 2006, and has been a staple of modern money management ever since. When you sign up with Mint, you provide the program with all of your financial accounts, including bank accounts, investments, retirement funds, credit cards, 529 accounts, and even real estate purchases. Mint allows you to see all of your financial information in a single dashboard, which also calculates your net worth. To get into the nitty-gritty details of your finances, and automatically assigns an income or expense category for each one. It also assigns a default budget to each category of expenses, although you can create your own monthly budget, as well.

The default mode is a nice way to start budgeting if you’ve never done so. You can see your financial progress using the trends function, which creates graphs and charts of your finances to help you understand where your money goes. Mint also helps you create goals—both savings and debt reduction—and tracks your progress. It’s important to note that Mint does gain access to your login credentials.

So there is the potential for exposure of this information. However, Mint offers the same kind of security you see at an online bank, making them just as safe as Capital One or Bank of America.

Pros: Mint is completely free, very user-friendly, and offers balance and spending alerts to keep your money on your mind. Cons: You have to manually track cash spending, some automatic expense categories are not useful/incorrect and need to be changed by the user. Cost: Free Quicken Quicken is the great-granddaddy of personal finance software–it was first introduced back in 1983. Though Quicken was owned by Intuit until a few years ago, the current version, Quicken 2019, has all the familiar tools and offerings that anyone who cut their teeth on the Intuit versions are used to.

For many people, Quicken’s biggest selling point is the fact that it is a software program you install on your hard drive, meaning all of your sensitive financial information is also stored there—making it secure from any potential hackers gunning for online personal finance programs. And new this year, you can now manage your money on the go across desktop, web, and mobile. In addition, because Quicken offers a great deal of customization and control, you can make the program work for your specific circumstances. In particular, investors can easily use Quicken to track their portfolios and quickly find any data they need in order to make investment decisions. The newest version of this software now allows users to automatically track and pay bills. Of course, Quicken is also well-known for its sunset provision that stops online features and formatted files from working after a certain time period, which means users have to buy a new license to continue using the software. Often, these updates also include a new interface, meaning users have to relearn the program after each update.

Pros: Quicken is the most comprehensive personal finance software available. Security-conscious users can rest assured that their information is completely safe.

Cons: The sunset provision can be extremely frustrating. Cost: Between $35 and $55, depending upon which specific software package you purchase. Zero-Based Budget Software YNAB You Need a Budget (YNAB for short) is an online budgeting program based on the envelope method, wherein budgeters set money aside for specific categories of spending.

The program guides you through the process of budgeting, setting goals and sticking to them, and reconciling accounts. The philosophy behind YNAB is built on that will help users live within their means:. Give Every Dollar a Job—All money you receive is assigned to a specific budget category.

Embrace Your True Expenses—Understand your irregular expenses. Roll With the Punches—You can strategically rearrange budget categories if your spending doesn’t exactly align with your plans. Age Your Money—You can end the paycheck-paycheck cycle by building a buffer of one month’s cash in hand. YNAB believes that in order to successfully budget, you need to be hands-on with your money. Until the version released in December 2015, users had to manually enter all transactions—although the program and its companion apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices made this very easy. This also means that YNAB is one of the few programs that easily allows users to track cash spending.

However, the program does now automatically import transactions, but it is up to the user to assign each transaction to its appropriate budget category. You may still use manual entry if you prefer, or a combination of automatic and manual. In addition to the program, signing up for YNAB gets you access to financial literacy classes, tutorials, a community of YNAB users, blog posts, and budgeting tools and tricks. As with Mint, YNAB’s security is bank-grade, and the program relies on third-party audits to maintain data privacy.

At $83.99 for a 12-month subscription (i.e., $6.99 per month), YNAB is not the cheapest personal finance program around, but you get a generous 34-day free trial before you commit. Pros: YNAB is geared toward teaching users how to budget and make managing their finances a habit. The large online community can be very helpful. Cons: The hands-on nature of the program might not appeal to all users. The cost is higher than most other personal software. Cost: $50 per year ProActive Budget The cash envelope method of budgeting is the age-old technique for preventing overspending.

The problem is that we live in an increasingly cashless society, and it can be tough to apply envelope budgeting strategies to modern methods of spending. Proactive is a forward-thinking solution that helps you make proactive decisions before purchases versus tracking your money afterward.

It’s a budgeting app based upon the cash envelope system. With this program, you will receive a Visa-branded ProActive debit card that you will transfer money to and then categorize into virtual envelopes. When it comes time to make a purchase, you will open up the app on your phone and tap which envelope the funds are coming from before swiping your card. If you forget to choose a spending category, your card will be declined. ProActive has also recently introduced a Kid Card, another no-fee debit card that you can use to pay their allowance, split money into customizable spending categories, and use for purchases without a phone. In addition, you can also link a credit card to the account. When you, ProActive automatically pays the amount of transaction to your credit card immediately, effectively turning your credit card into a debit card.

Best Home Budget Software For Mac 2017

This means you can get the great rewards offered by credit cards and avoid the trap carrying a balance month to month. One caveat, however, is that if you are unable to use your phone at the time of a purchase, you will not be able to use your ProActive debit card. This seems like it could be problematic if you have any issues with data on your smartphone. Pros: Like traditional envelope budgeting, you cannot make a purchase with ProActive Budget unless you know which envelope the money is coming from. That's the brilliance with this innovation.

The credit card linkup allows you to enjoy the benefits of credit while making sure you set aside the money to pay off your bill each month. Cons: The fact that you are unable to use your ProActive debit card if you do not have your phone available could be problematic if you lose a data connection. ProActive recommends taking a separate pay card to alleviate this concern. Cost: The program costs $69 per year ($5.75 per month). Learn more and get started with. Use the code PTMONY to get a $5 discount when you subscribe. Mvelopes Like YNAB, Mvelopes is personal finance software that offers a 21 st century method for following the envelope budgeting method.

This online tool has both Android and iPhone apps that allow you to keep track of your spending on the go. When you sign up with Mvelopes, you link up to four bank accounts (including checking accounts, credit card accounts, and PayPal accounts, among others) and create an unlimited number of spending. The program automatically tracks your transactions, which you then assign to the correct spending envelope, where the amount of your transaction is subtracted from the money in that envelope. You may also manually track cash transactions. One of the unique features of Mvelopes is how it handles credit card purchases. When a user makes a purchase using a credit card, the program removes the transaction amount from the spending envelope and places it in a special envelope to pay off the credit card.

When your credit card bill arrives, the amount due is already set aside in the envelope, so you will be able to pay off your bill in full. The basic Mvelopes program costs $4 per month or $40 per year, if you pay all at once. The next tier is Mvelopes Plus, which costs $19 per month or $190 per year. This program offers everything in the Basic version, but also offers access to a debt reduction plan and guidance and a quarterly check in from a personal finance trainer. The Mvelopes Complete version costs $59 per month, or $149 per quarter, or $549 per year. If you sign up for the Complete version, you get monthly one-on-one sessions with a personal finance trainer, a customized financial plan, and full access to all the budgeting tools on the platform. As with other online personal finance programs, your information is kept secure with the same top-level SSL encryption technology used by all major banks.

Pros: Mvelopes is set up to be interactive in order to teach users how to budget. The credit card spending envelope feature is a very helpful aspect of the program.

Cons: Multiple reviewers have stated that the program is not necessarily intuitive. Cost: $4/month or $40/year for Mvelopes Basic, $19/month or $190/year for Mvelopes Plus, $59/month or $149/quarter or $549/year for Mvelopes Complete EveryDollar Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt and budgeting guru, released his free online budgeting software in March of 2015. In keeping with his teachings, EveryDollar is focused on tracking every dollar so that all of your money is accounted for and you know exactly where it is all going. According to the EveryDollar website (and borne out by multiple testers), you can create a budget on their intuitive and user-friendly online program in 10 minutes. The program offers eight main spending/saving categories to help you get started with creating your budget.

These include:. Giving. Savings. Housing. Transportation. Food.

Lifestyle. Insurance & Tax. Debt If you decide to create additional categories in your budget, the program makes that category a savings goal, and you will input how much you plan to spend for each category per month. Creating the budget is the easiest part. From there, it is up to you to input all of your transactions manually. (EveryDollar Plus, which costs $99 per year, will automatically import transactions for you.) There are both iPhone and Android apps available to make inputting transactions simple while you are out and about. One common complaint about EveryDollar is that it does not allow users to create recurring transactions, which can cause you more work as you try to reconcile your transactions with your budget.

One added benefit to using budget software from Dave Ramsey is the fact that EveryDollar helps you walk through his 7 baby steps to get out of debt and build wealth. The program offers you the option of using excess funds for the baby steps, which can help you reach your financial independence. Pros: The program is very easy to set up, with an intuitive user-interface and well-thought-out defaults. If you are a follower of Dave Ramsey’s teachings, EveryDollar will help you meet the goals he suggests. Cons: The free version of the software does not automatically add transactions, nor does it allow you to set up recurring transactions, which can cause some reconciliation headaches. Cost: EveryDollar basic is completely free. EveryDollar Plus costs $99 per year.

SpendPal (Formerly Envudu) This program was designed in collaboration with Dr. Dan Ariely’s Behavioral Science Lab at Duke University. SpendPal offers another option for envelope budgeters in.

When you sign up, the program asks you to sort the money in your checking account into separate spending Categories. You give each Category a monthly allowance and rank your Categories in order of priority. Whenever a new deposit comes into your bank account, your Categories are automatically filled in order. When you make a purchase, you will open the SpendPal app on your phone, select which Category you are spending from, and swipe your debit card to complete the purchase. If you don’t have your phone available, the app will deduct the transaction from your default spending category, but it will also mark the purchase as unverified, and you will be prompted to verify or re-categorize it the next time you use the app. If you are tempted to make a purchase that would overspend the proper category, then you will need to make a trade-off from another category.

This can help you pause long enough to decide if the purchase is worth raiding another spending category. Though SpendPal officially launched in June 2018, it is still in beta testing, which is good news for you. All beta testers get to use SpendPal for free for a full year.

When it becomes fully available, there will be an unspecified monthly or yearly subscription fee for the service. Pros: For beginning budgeters, the automatic filling of your spending categories can be an excellent introduction to money management.

The fact that you can make “unverified” purchases without your phone available could be handy for the phone challenged. Cons: The availability of “unverified” purchases without a phone could get some users in trouble.

The lack of a credit card option might turn some users off. Cost: Free for beta testers. There will be an unspecified monthly or yearly subscription fee once the program becomes fully available. Internet explore website for mac. Money/Budget Assistants Pluto Money This entirely free app is specifically geared toward helping “the Snapchat generation” get a handle on their money. Once you’ve downloaded the free Pluto app (which is currently only available for iPhone, although Android users can join a waitlist), the program will have you start by setting short- and mid-term savings goals, since having something to save for is such an important part of getting finances in order. To help you save more, Pluto gives you simple challenges specifically tailored to your finances. For instance, the app might challenge you to spend under your average in coffee purchases or at a specific merchant this week or month.

When you succeed, the app will show you the savings impact on your goals, although it is up to you to manually transfer the saved funds over to your goal account. Pluto also offers Peer Insights, that can help you see how your spending compares to your peers—you can see how your stats compare using criteria that include age, gender, income, relationship status (which includes dating, so it’s not just the married/single binary), and college campus.

You can even play around and compare you spending to different demographics. The app’s Behavioral Nudges are notifications that encourage you to save more for you goals and stay on track with your challenges. There are also notifications for when new transactions post, which have helped users to catch fraud. One of the newest features on the app is the Personal Insights feature. This offers a lightweight, actionable way for you to learn about your finances and habits without getting overwhelmed. You’ll see snapshot summaries, then you can dive into details only if you want to or need to.

You have the option of easily taking part in challenges on the spending categories you want to cut down on. Unlike other apps that can show you the insights into your finances, this feature combines the information with actionable challenges to help you improve. Pros: The app is very user-friendly and is geared toward both helping you learn more about your money and make better decisions with your money. Cons: Currently, the app is only available for Apple, although an Android version is in the works. Cost: Free Joy Joy was created to improve your happiness by changing the way you choose to spend and save your money. Scott Saunders, CEO of, pulled together a team of talented psychologists, neuroscientists, financial service experts, designers, and technology professionals to create an app that focuses on the psychology of people’s relationship with money. Their objective is to help people develop a positive relationship with money, so they can achieve their financial goals and dreams.

The Joy app will help you do two things: rate your spending, and save money. The app will ask you to rate each transaction you make with either a smiley face or a sad face. This will help you recognize what spending makes you happy so you can stop making purchases that don't add to your life. As for the savings, each day when you open the app, you will be asked to save an amount of money that Joy's algorithm has found “safe” to save. The money goes into an FDIC-insured Joy Savings account. Currently, Joy is only available for iPhone users but has a waitlist for anyone using Androids.

Once you download Joy onto your iPhone, you will be prompted to answer a set of questions. These questions determine your personality type and your money philosophy in order to better understand you and to help you reach your financial goals. You are then paired with a money coach based on the answers you provided. Your money coach will help guide you to take control of your finances. Pros: This app gives you the opportunity to improve your financial habits by asking you to think about how your spending makes you feel and by prompting you to set aside savings every day. Cons: The app is not currently available for Android. Fees: Free.

Platform: Currently, Joy is only supported on iOS platforms and they are working on launching an application for Android in the near future. Best For: Anyone who wants to improve their spending habits with strong support and encouragement from a coach’s feedback. Pennies This very intuitive iPhone app helps even the most absent-minded of spenders to stay on budget. Pennies allows you to set a number of budgets (such as monthly fun money, weekly food spending, and the like), with a start date, length of budget term, and the amount available to spend. Each time you make a purchase, you enter the amount into Pennies, which will show you the number of dollars and days remaining in that particular budget.

The app uses colors to help you gauge the health of your budget—a red background shows you that your money is quickly dwindling, while green and blue lets you know you are cleared for additional purchases. If you forget to log purchases, you’ll get an occasional reminder from the app to go back to tracking. Pennies does not sync with your financial institutions and only tracks a single source of money at a time, which can make things a little difficult for anyone with multiple bank accounts or payment methods. Pros: This app is easy to use and offers a convenient method for tracking spending. Cons: Pennies only tracks one source of money, which means it might not work for individuals with more complicated finances. The app is only available for iPhone.

Fees: $3.99 one time purchase fee. Best for: Beginning budgeters.

Other Budget Software Debitize Debitize was the runner-up, and it definitely earned a place in modern FinTech. It offers a solution for consumers who have trouble with credit card spending but do not want to give up the protections and rewards offered by credit cards.

When you sign up with Debitize, the program monitors your credit card activity and automatically transfers the amount of your credit card transaction from your checking account into your Debitize account. Then, the program automatically pays your credit card bill on the due date with money set aside in your Debitize account. If you choose to sign up for Credit Optimizer (for a $3/month subscription fee), Debitize will pay your credit cards weekly instead of monthly. To make sure Debitize does not overdraw your checking account, you can set up a minimum balance amount. (The default minimum balance is $100, but you can set it to whatever amount will work for you.) The program will notify you when Debitize withdrawals take you down to your minimum balance, and it will continue to monitor your checking account for deposits so it can transfer the necessary funds. If you encounter an emergency and need to access the funds in your Debitize account, you may request a transfer back to your checking account—although the program discourages this unless necessary.

Debitize will not work for individuals with a serious spending or credit problem since your credit card will not be declined at the register if you do not have sufficient funds in your checking account. But for the average consumer, Debitize can be a great program for getting a handle on credit card spending, while still enjoying the benefits of credit card perks. Pros: Debitize allows users to have the best of both the debit and credit card world. You save money in credit card interest by always paying your bill in full, while still reaping your credit card rewards and protections. Cons: Those who consistently struggle with overspending will not be helped by the Debitize model. Fees: None for the basic program.

The Credit Optimizer option costs $3/month, although you can try it free for a month. Best For: Consumers who are able to responsibly use debit cards, but struggle with credit. Learn more and get started with AccountMe Large corporations use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) in their bookkeeping—so why shouldn’t individualsdo the same?

GAAP allows for efficient, comprehensive, and consistent accounting, which would be a boon to the average budgeter. AccountMe offers users a customizable GAAP accounting framework that allows you to view, edit, and budget your finances using the same double-entry bookkeeping as multi-national corporations. This means users will have an incredibly accurate view of their finances. AccountMe describes itself as just like corporate accounting, with a few twists.

Specifically, tracking your expenses in a personal budget needs a little more nuance than traditional GAAP accounting allows, so AccountMe divides your expenses into three categories: Necessary Fixed Expenses, Necessary Variable Expenses, and Discretionary Expenses. For users who are familiar with GAAP accounting, AccountMe offers an easy-to-use budgeting app that will dovetail with their accounting knowledge and provide a comprehensive view of their money. According to their website, AccountMe will soon be offering features to link to bank accounts and credit/debit cards to allow automatic population of your expenses. Pros: Having a customizable GAAP accounting platform as an app on your smartphone is a major boon for anyone already familiar with GAAP. Cons: If you do not already know GAAP, it is not necessarily easy to learn from a smartphone app.

This is only available for Apple. Cost: The AccountMe website is no longer functioning, although you can still download the app from the iTunes App store. It is unclear how much the app costs based on the information available on iTunes. When the website was still active, there were three levels, starting at $9.99 per month for the basic platform, $24.99 for the mid-level, and $49.99 for the highest level (nicknamed the Gordon Gekko level, which indicates the creators of AccountMe have a sense of humor).

Budget Software Graveyard Change (While Change is still active for current users, it is not accepting new registrations. You can enter your email to be notified when it begins accepting new users again).

The founders of Change started with a simple idea: the best way to influence people to save is to spark behavioral change. After all, consumers have 100% control over what they spend and save, and yet they do not necessarily make the best decisions for themselves. So the Change virtual finance assistant, unlike other apps and programs on this list, does not automatically change your saving or spending habits. What it does is alert you to those habits and give you choices for how to make changes.

Here’s how it works. When you sign up with Change—which the creators describe as an “invisible” app, since there is no app icon on your device—you link your bank and credit card accounts to the program, which anonymizes and encrypts your information for your security. Once your accounts are linked, Change analyzes your spending habits to find bad financial behavior.

It then sends you text messages to alert you to behavior you may be unaware of and suggests simple ways to change the behavior. For instance, you might receive a message alert pointing out that your $14.95 per month Audible subscription costs you $179.40 per year. Or Change may text you to let you know your top spending category for the previous month was $200 in coffee shops, where you never spent more than $15 at a time. Those little nudges can help you become more aware of your spending habits without asking you to drastically alter your lifestyle.

Change offers suggestions for how to reduce such costs so that you can seamlessly reduce spending without feeling deprived. Change also offers an automated savings algorithm that moves small amounts of money to a Change savings account.

This way, as you learn to curb your spending, you can instantly see how it boosts your savings. In addition, Change labs is also piloting a Predictive Overdraft Protection program. This program will make use of Change's predictive capabilities to alert customers five days in advance of a possible overdraft event and its consequences. If you want to avoid the overdraft, you will be able to hit accept and Change will extend you a short-term loan, with funds automatically added to your account within two business days.

The pricing for loans through the Predictive Overdraft Protection™ are dramatically lower than overdraft fees. Paying off your loan will be easy and painless, as the amount you owe will be slowly deducted from your account over several days once your account balance allows it. Pros: Change is all about teaching users to be mindful spenders, which is the kind of long-term lesson that all consumers need to learn. There is no expectation that you will completely give up the spending habits that make you happy. These concepts are based on solid research in behavioral economics. Cons: Change currently only supports financial institutions in the U.S.

Fees: None. Best for: Change’s creators are specifically targeting 25-35 year old Millennials, although anyone who is looking for more insight into their spending habits would get a lot out of this virtual financial assistant. Learn more and get started with Hip Money (Though the website claims that the Hip Money app is available, it cannot be found on either the iTunes store or on Google Play) Imagine you had a financially savvy best friend who you could fold up and put in your pocket. He’d do all the calculationsyou’d need to figure out how to reach your goals (with his tiny pocket calculator), suggest an amount of money you could set aside every day to reach those goals, and give you itty bitty high-fives when you saved money. The app Hip Money is that financial best friend.

When you sign up with Hip Money, you securely link it to your checking, savings, banking, and/or loan accounts so the program can understand your spending habits. From there, you will. Once a day, the app will ping you with a personalized daily savings recommendation.

This is an amount of money that the program has determined you can safely set aside based upon the money you have coming in and going out. The really exciting feature of Hip Money is that it will show you how much that daily savings recommendation will be worth depending on where you send it. For instance, if you are saving up for a trip to Cabo in a savings account, the $5.55 the app recommends that you put aside will be worth $5.89 with the small amount of interest you earn. If you send the $5.55 to your student loan, it could save you $29.78 over the life of the loan. And if you put that $5.55 in your retirement account, it will grow to be worth $67.91 by the time you retire.

Once you have decided where to send your savings, a simple swipe will send the money to your selected account, and the app then applauds you for making progress on your goals. Pros: The app is designed to help you reach your goals without asking you to sacrifice your priorities or make drastic changes to your spending habits. It’s all about making saving money easy. Cons: It’s not entirely clear how the program determines a safe amount for you to save each day, nor what safeguards are in place to protect you from a potential overdraft.

Cost: Once Hip Money launches, the app will cost $18 per year. Level Level (Level is no longer active) The Level Money app syncs with your bank account and determines how much will be left in that account after automatically deducting upcoming bills, recent purchases, and your savings goals. It then gives you an estimate of the amount of money that’s safe for you to spend over the next day, week, and month. Since Cashpath offers you a single dashboard to see all of your transactions, it’s a great tool for anyone who struggles to keep track of their cash flow. The attractive and easy-to-use interface will make budgeting something you look forward to doing.

Though it is not yet available, the creators of Cashpath intend to have the app eventually offer options for doing the savings for you. It is not clear if that will be set up to be completely automatic, or if it will require input from you. Pros: This is a gorgeous and easy-to-use interface. The program offers a simple method for on-the-go budgeting for individuals who break out in hives at the idea of a spreadsheet. Cons: The program is still new, and not all of the potential options are available yet. Cost: Free Unsplurge Unsplurge (Unsplurge is no longer active) Would-be savers who would like some community encouragement will love Unsplurge.

This iPhone app asks you to choose a goal and upload a picture of your goal. Once you have set your goal, it can then be shared with “Town,” which is the community platform for Unsplurge, where users can see others’ savings goals and cheer each other on. You (and Town, if you choose) will get to see your progress as you put money aside for your goal.

Unsplurge is not synced with your bank, so it is up to you to actually save the money. However, the app is designed to help you create and maintain a habit, using both community and personal motivation to keep you on track. In addition, the app offers savings tips, such as a, to help you get into the savings frame of mind. Pros: Both the progress bar and the community aspect of Unsplurge can be very motivating and help you to establish a habit of saving money.

Cons: Unsplurge does not help you budget or identify money that it is safe to put aside in savings. Also, the app is only available on the iPhone. Fees: None.

Best for: Those who are comfortable with budgeting but need additional motivation to save money. Penny Penny (Penny is no longer active) What if you had a money-savvy friend who could look over your finances, put the information into an easy-to-read graph,and even give you financial advice? That’s the idea behind the newly released Penny 2.0, the personal finance app that feels as easy as texting with a really helpful friend. After you sync the app with your bank, each time you open it Penny will greet you and allow you to respond with a choice of several pre-written questions. Penny’s answers will help you better understand your current financial picture, and improve how you are spending your money. Penny will let you know when you have bills coming up and will forecast where you'll be at the end of the month if you continue spending in the same way.

New with this version, the app helps you understand if you're getting your money's worth from subscriptions and will help you cancel them. Penny 2.0 will also alert you to any data breaches that might affect you, so that you can be on alert for suspicious activity. Finally, Penny offers you a more traditional breakdown of your finances so you can choose to dig into the specifics of your financial life.

Pros: This easy to use app takes a great deal of the intimidation out of finance. In addition, Penny’s pre-written questions allow new budgeters to know what to ask even if they would otherwise be confused. Cons: The pre-written questions might be annoying to a more advanced budgeter.

Fee: None. Best for: Beginning budgeters. When a user is required to sign up to the company web site and hand over his/her account numbers, user name, password etc it raises a major concern about security and data usage.

I believe that perhaps private information should remain private and not stored or viewed by anyone else than the actual owner of the information. That is why i use Geltbox Money – it doesn’t use any third party Aggregation site. Moreover, Geltbox is the only personal finance software that has the ability to work with any financial institution in the world.