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6 Best Budgeting Apps for Saving Money
- YNAB – best for zero-based budgeting
- Mint – best free app
- Empower – best for investors
- Pocketguard – best for overspenders
- Goodbudget – best for digital envelopes
- Honeydue – best for couples
- YNAB
Cost: $14.99/month or $99.99/ year with annual payment. Free for one year for college students.
YNAB (You Need A Budget) is our top choice for zero-based budgeting (ZBB). For more info on ZBB, check out “The 3 Best Ways To Budget Your Money”. YNAB is a powerful budgeting tool that lets you set goals, generate reports, and assign all of your income to a spending or saving category. This app also offers a lot of learning resources about budgeting and using the app to help you get started. If you are looking for the most capable and hands-on budgeting tool to manage your money, and are willing to invest both some money and time to use it, then we recommend trying YNAB.
- Mint
Cost: Free ($4.99/month for Premiun)
Mint is our favorite free budgeting app since it has so many great features. With Mint, you can track and categorize spending, specific saving goals, receive payment reminders, and carryover unused funds in your budget. Mint also comes with a number of learning resources, investment tracking, access to credit scores, and great data protection features. If you upgrade to a Premium account, you’ll get a more detailed spending analysis and ad-free experience.
- Empower
Cost: Free (0.89% for investment management of accounts with less than $1 million)
Empower is a free budgeting app with a lot of great investment features. This app lets you track expenses and net worth, customize spending categories, and connect to bank, credit card, and investment accounts. Empower offers basic budgeting features, but really stands out when it comes to investing and financial planning. In addition to being able to track net worth, you can also use Empower’s investment fee analyzer to better understand all the fees for your portfolio. Empower also has Education and Retirement Planner tools to help you be prepared for financing these life events. If you want basic budgeting capability with more of an emphasis on investing and building wealth, Empower may be the best choice.
- Pocketguard
Cost: Basic is Free, and Plus is $7.99/month, $34.99/year, or $79.99 for a lifetime subscription.
Pocketguard is our top choice for identifying and preventing overspending. This app includes a unique analysis tool that uses income and spending data to determine how much you should spending to reach your financial goals and how much you are overspending if you are not on track to meet your goals. Pocketguard also lets you customize spending categories, automate savings transfers, export data, and even provides suggestions for lowering payments. Security features include While Pocketguard doesn’t have an overwhelming number of budgeting features, the features it has work really well. If you are willing to pay to avoid overspending, Pocketguard can help.
- Goodbudget
Cost: Basic for Free, Plus for $8/month or $70/year
Goodbudget is a great app for digital envelope budgeting. For more info on the envelope budgeting method, check out “The 3 Best Ways To Budget Your Money”. The free version comes with one account, access on two devices, and a limited number of envelopes. The paid version, Plus, comes with an unlimited number of accounts and envelopes, and access on five devices. If you are looking for a straightforward app for digital enveloping, and don’t mind manually adding financial info, or paying for full capability, then check out Goodbudget.
- Honeydue
Cost: Free
Honeydue is our favorite budgeting app for couples. This free app offers essential budgeting features, like automated and customizable expense categories, bill reminders, and syncing bank, loan, credit card and investment accounts. Where this app really stands out is in its capability to perform all of these tasks for both you and your partner. Honeydue can provide a complete financial overview for couples. With this app, you can even receive notifications when you or your partner are close to exceeding your monthly spending limits. If you are looking to improve financial communication and set saving goals with your partner, we recommend downloading Honeydue.