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Apps To Help Budget And Save – We independently review everything we recommend. When you make a purchase through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more
After another round of testing, Simplifi by Quicken remains our top pick. We still recommend You Need a Budget (YNAB) for those who track every penny with a zero-based budgeting method.
Apps To Help Budget And Save
For some people, setting up a budget is less exciting (and sometimes fruitless) than starting a diet. For others, creating a spending plan gives them a feel-good dopamine boost. No matter where you are on that spectrum, a budget app can be a great tool to help you achieve your financial goals. After another round of testing nearly a dozen apps, we continue to recommend Simplifi by Quicken as the easiest, most comprehensive way to see where your money is going and plan for future expenses.
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For those looking for a budget that forces them to accurately account for every dollar in their bank account, we recommend You Need a Budget (YNAB). It’s not as easy to set up and use as Simplifi, but if you’re the type to maintain a diet by tracking every calorie, YNAB’s zero-based budget approach may strike a chord with you.
Simplifi combines an elegant, intuitive interface with powerful tools to track your expenses and plan for future expenses. The bank also had the fewest connectivity issues among the apps we tested.
Most budgeting apps are easy to set up but ultimately useless when it comes to money management, or complicated and dull enough to put someone off without a week to research their finances. Simplify threads the needle. It allows you to sync your bank accounts seamlessly and it offers you a combination of helpful tools and user-friendly design. Our favorite feature is the personalized spending plan, which gives you a dollar figure you have left to spend for the rest of the month after calculating your bills and savings goals. Simplifi isn’t free, but it’s cheaper than competitors with comparable features. Plus, having some skin in the game forces you to stick with it.
YNAB has some sync issues and a steep learning curve, but it remains a great choice for hard-core budgeters.
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For a more rigorous approach to managing your money, a zero-based budgeting system—where you allocate every dollar in your bank account to a spending category or savings goal at the beginning of each month—may be for you. You Need a Budget (YNAB) is an excellent app that supports this method or budgeting philosophy. The complexity of getting allocations right takes some time to really understand, but for those who fit this approach, the payoff is enormous: Your brain is trained to spend less. In addition to the steep learning curve, YNAB had more sync issues with some banks in our tests. It also lacks some of Simplify’s features, such as cash flow projections, desktop notifications, and live customer support.
Wirecutter senior staff writer Melanie Pinola researches and writes about home-office products and technology, including our guide to the best online tax-filing software. For five years before joining Wirecutter, she wrote extensively about personal finance for sites such as Lifehacker, SmartAsset and MyBankTracker.
Author Taylor Tepper has been covering personal finance for nearly a decade, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, Time, Money Magazine, Bloomberg, and NPR, among others. He won the 2017 Loeb Award for his work on the economic costs of mental illness.
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If you want to live within your means and make your money grow, the most basic rule of personal finance is: spend less than you earn and save the rest. (Or, put another way, earn more than you spend and save the difference.) This is harder than it sounds, especially if you don’t track your income and expenses.
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A budget app for those who want to get a better handle on their finances without having to manually calculate the numbers in a spreadsheet every month. When connected to your bank and credit card accounts, the budgeting app automatically shows all of your transactions in one place—and, typically, categorizes them for you and can generate helpful reports to give you a view of your spending. We know many people are concerned about the security and privacy of these apps; More on that in a bit.
But, does everyone need a budget app? No. Using a detailed, category-based budgeting system like our picks isn’t for everyone—and these apps have their critics.
Personal finance writer Heline Olen makes the case in Slate for why such a precise and precise approach to personal budgeting can be so misleading. The crux of her argument is that most people’s income and expenses are enough from month to month to make budgeting useless.
We’re sympathetic to Olen’s argument and don’t believe everyone needs a detailed budget. After all, if you spent $100 or $200 on wine this month, what would you do as long as you spent less than you did?
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A budget app for those who want to get a better handle on their finances without having to manually calculate the numbers in a spreadsheet every month.
There are two basic types of budget apps: trackers (à la Mint) and zero balancers. Tracking apps provide a 30,000-foot view of your finances, display your transactions in real-time, and require very little effort to set up. In contrast, zero-balance apps encourage a more hands-on approach, forcing you to account for every dollar you bring in (X amount for savings, Y amount for rent, and so on), but they can be awkward and expensive. We recommend Simplifi to most people because it’s a happy medium between the two. It tracks your spending history, revolving bills, savings goals and income and predicts how much you need to spend in a given month in any category you want. Spreadsheet-based budgets (and some other budgeting tools) create multiple categories and prompt you to allocate a dollar amount to each, which is not only overwhelming but also prone to failure. (Ever get hit with a big bill, like an auto repair or emergency dental treatment? Things like that might not keep track of your budget.)
A mix of these policies tracks how many Americans actually behave. A 2013 Gallup survey found that one in three US households has a detailed, written budget, while two-thirds of Americans have a budget in some form, according to Debt.com. (Both polls are also from the pre-pandemic period.)
The key is to choose a method that makes you feel comfortable and actually works with your lifestyle. Both of our options offer a free trial period, so you should experiment before settling on an option. And if you don’t want to use an app, we’ve got tips on how to budget on your own.
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Trust us, connecting our bank accounts and entrusting apps with our financial data made us nervous too. As part of our research, in addition to reading the privacy and security policies of these apps, we contacted the companies behind our picks and asked them to respond to a series of questions about what we thought were important privacy and security considerations. This includes:
Most budget apps use a third-party service to integrate data from your bank into the app; Budgeting apps give you ways to read that data in one place. Third-party services include Plaid and Envestnet Yodley. These services have their own security policies and procedures, which makes it very difficult to predict everything. But the companies are well-known in the industry and are used by financial institutions to provide easy-to-read consumer transactions. All of them claim not to sell or share personal information—just as your bank promises to protect your privacy.
What if something goes wrong and someone can access your account with one of these budget apps?
The good news is that while the person can see a list of your transactions, they can’t move money or log into your bank account directly on the website. Your bank credentials are not stored anywhere in the Budget app that can be read.
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However, even if this information is anonymous, you probably don’t mind your financial transactions being leaked. That’s why we strongly recommend that any app you use—especially budget apps and financial apps—be properly secured by:
Remember—especially with free apps—the more services, features, and “shared interactions” an app has, the more liable it is to leak data. An app may claim that its data collection is anonymous or that it’s impossible to find you, but this isn’t entirely true, especially without industry oversight of these apps. This is one reason why we don’t recommend Mint if you have privacy concerns.
Here are highlights of our picks’ responses to our security questions and links to their security and privacy policies, if you’d like to investigate further.
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