The 7 Best Apps to Help You Stick to a Budget (No, Seriously)

Making and maintaining a weekly, monthly, and annual budget is a big part of staying financially afloat, making sure we’re living within our means, and planning for our future.

This can be as small an issue of knowing exactly what our income is and what our expenses are, but also more complex ones such as investments, real estate, and planning for larger, sometimes unexpected, expenses.

The best budgeting apps will help you sync all your financial data and accounts in one place, track your spending, and keep an eye on your expenses. Knowing the breakdown of what you’re spending on and where can help eliminate unnecessary expenses — and figure out where you should devote larger or smaller percentages of your income.

Here are the seven best apps to help manage your budget and finances. 

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This is a solid go-to budgeting app. It can give your payments and expenses a once-over and help you to create a budgeting plan that will save you money. It’s sort of like creating a meal plan for your finances. It can even scan bills and give feedback on how to spend less on similar services elsewhere. 

If you can’t stand spending too much for something that’s just as good for less elsewhere, this will change your life. Rocket Money has a free and premium plan. The premium one has some great added value, such as concierge services that can cancel subscriptions you probably never used and forgot you had. 

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You Need A Budget (YNAB)

We can’t undo the past; we can only learn from our previous choices and make better moves going forward. This app is all about planning future financial decisions.

Just input your income and various expenses, and the app will teach you how to divide the money you take home accordingly. A portion will go to expenses, of course, but also to goals and savings. 

This teaches you to be proactive and participate in how and where you spend your money. YNAB lets you link everywhere your money may be, such as savings accounts, credit cards, and loans. It’s all about developing and maintaining that much-needed focus, and making smarter spending choices rather than impulse-based ones. 

This app is very helpful as far as making and sticking to a budget, but it’s also really a great asset as far as putting all that important financial data in one place where it’ll be easily accessible.

It helps out in other ways, like budget alerts and coupon finds, and can also be synced with all your other financial apps so that everything you need to stay on top of your budget is in one centralized location. Use it to see where you’re spending the most and where you can cut back.

If you have a retirement account or any other sort of investment portfolio or real estate, this helps you keep track of it and analyze all of your finances all at once, with all the data in one place in front of you.

Personal Capital helps you to set goals and also stay on top of your budget, and even plan ahead for big expenses, like buying a house, going to college, or planning your retirement. While it’s mostly meant for investing, it’s also a great idea for everyday budgeting.

This app does exactly what the name implies. SpendTracker helps you to track your spending, whether it’s on a weekly, monthly, or even annual basis. It does so in a way that makes everything easier to understand, from easy (and rather adorable!) graphs to charts that break down your spending by categories that apply to your life and needs.

This makes it easier to decide how and where to make the necessary changes to spend your money smarter and eliminate waste. 

Investing may seem out of reach for many of us. We’re just trying to pay our bills! But investing can be a great way to generate passive income going forward and this is a great app for anyone who is looking to get started with investing but simply doesn’t know how.

Stash helps you find the right investment for you, based on your budget and interests, and then teaches you how to start funding it. You can get started with as little as $5 in funding. Investing doesn’t have to be scary — or expensive! 

This is a very simple and streamlined zero-based budgeting app. EveryDollar aims to teach you how to develop a budgeting plan in that all your income is accounted for within a specified time period.

The goal in this sort of strategy is that your income with your expenses subtracted will equal zero. If this is what you are going for, this is an app that keeps it simple and straightforward and helps you get control of balancing those finances.