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How are your finances looking? Have you been sticking to the goals you set at the beginning of the year, or do you find yourself putting it off for the next month? We have all made promises to save a little more and spend a little less, but life can happen, making plans fall to the wayside. Thankfully there are smartphone apps that hold us accountable. Here are ten to keep you on the road to financial freedom.
Mint.com
Price: Free
Voted CNN Money‘s 2012 Best Banking & Budget App and 2012 Webby Award winner for Financial Services & People’s Voice, Mint.com is a trusted app among millions. Mint helps you manage all of your financial accounts by monitoring them in one place along with credit cards and lingering student loans. You can create budgets, plan ahead for future endeavors and receive alerts of low balances, unusual spending, nearing bills and more.
Home Budget with Sync
Price: Free (optional premium upgrade, $4.99)
A good way to stay on top of your finances is by tracking your spending. Home Budget offers an integrated system that allows you to schedule recurring obligations and flows of income. There are tons of sub-category options for accurate monitoring (you can create your own if needed) among other features. This app is easy to use and has an option to sync with other devices in your household.
Pageonce
Price: Free
People might not admit it, but having an app with a fab appearance can make it easy to use. Pageonce makes the process of budgeting and bill paying nice and the experience even more awesome. It’s bright colors and simple design makes everything readable and helps get you excited for tackling debt and paying down those horrid bills. Seriously, who wouldn’t want real time accuracy with the ability to pay your bills on the spot with the push of a button?
Expense Manager
Price: Free (optional premium upgrade $4.99)
Those a wee more savvy in the world of finance should consider Expense Manager that has some Wall Street forward features. Let’s see – there is a currency converter to make financial management less of a math problem and all the charts your budgeting heart desires. In addition to tracking expenses and monitoring your budget (by day, week, month or year), you can perform other financial-related tasks like calculating tips and sales tax.
Expensify
Price: Free
Hey all you jetsetters constantly on the go; you might want this app to help you out with your schedule and finances. Expensify does just what it says by capturing receipts, logging expenses and other cool stuff. Why sit behind a lousy desk when you can take care of business on the go with your smartphone? There is even a Smartscan that reads images for faster and more accurate tracking. Heck, you can even log mileage with your GPS.
iXpensit
Pricing: Free (optional premium upgrade $4.99)
iXpensit is an awesome iPhone app that simplifies your daily spending and budgets. If you need better visuals on where your money goes, this app is just for you. Kinda makes you want to rethink those tall lattes from Starbucks, huh? It even has a pseudo battery visual that increases when you have more income, and decreases when you start to get low. With the option to create PDF reports, you have instant access to bookkeeping tools you need to stay on track and in great financial health.
Bill Tracker
Price: $1.99
Can you pay my bills? Can you pay my telephone bill? Destiny’s Child was on to something. But if we wait for someone to take on our debt we will forever owe which is not hot! If you have been late paying a bill (hey – it’s easy to forget), you need to install Bill Tracker on your phone that will do the remembering for you. You can log in anything from your car note to your water bill and let the app keep you on track. Perks include due date alerts, payment confirmation and a calendar to see what you paid and what’s coming due.
Shoeboxed
Price: Free
Raise your hand if you are old school and have a ton of shoe boxes in your closet full of receipts. This was okay back in the day, but now we use electronic storage in case your physical papers get destroyed. Shoeboxed takes all of your receipts you hoard (keep) and turns them into data for bookkeeping. Even the IRS accepts many of the digitalized receipts Shoeboxed makes which is super convenient for tax season. You can demystify your spending just by the snap of a receipt photo.
DebtTracker Pro
Price: $1.99
Trying to do the right thing can be very hard at times and paying off debt falls into that category. Sometimes we get so bogged down with who and how much we owe that rising to the financial surface does not seem like a possibility. DebtTracker Pro is an app that has many monitoring services, but one in particular that is quite helpful. The Debt Snowball Tracking feature creates a clear path that will formulate a payment strategy to make you debt free. Seeing the finish line can make the journey a bit more bearable.
