Manage Your Expenses And Save Painlessly With These Great Smartphone Apps

Not everyone is great with money—some, like me, are just really good at spending them. I have a bad habit of delaying bill payments until I really need to settle them (a.k.a. disconnection time), and I tend to push my spending to the limit, crawling for air in the last days until payday.

If you’re like me, or wouldn’t want to be, then maybe you should start using these mobile money management apps to help you use and spend your money more wisely.

Money Lover

This app is a great one-stop shop for all your money management needs. One of the best features of the app is it requires you to record all your daily transactions so it can show you how much money you spend each month on each category such as food, shopping, or transportation. This helps you get an overall look at your expenses so you can also plan where to cut on your spending. Imagine if you see all your money going into your transportation because of all your Uber and Grab rides—that’s going to impact the way you commute next time.

The app can get really droll, too, if you don’t input your expenses for the day. Once, my partner failed to put in his food expenses and Money Lover notified him: “Did you starve yourself again?”

Add that to the cute piggy bank logo and tell us this isn’t the most adorable and efficient money managing app out there.

Mint

If you want to be a little more comprehensive about your money management, you can check out Mint since it allows you to sync all your cards into the app. By doing this, you get to have an overview of your money’s movement. You can see your bills and money together in one place so you can view exactly what’s due, when is it due, and how much will be left after you pay for it.

Monitor all your fund sources and destinations in one place instead of logging into multiple sites separately to track your bills and your cards. With this, you’ll never miss that bill due date or pay for late fees since the app alerts you when you need to cough up some cash.

Unsplurge

The funny thing is, we budget our money and save so we can spend even more! If you want to save up for an upcoming travel or a pair of brand new kicks, then this app will help you get closer to your goal. It acts like a vision board of sorts for your spending dreams, and you get to log and track your progress to that goal. Pin a photo of that Michael Kors bag or that trip to Paris and see your progress bar fill up.

And what better way to motivate yourself than to have others cheering for you? Unsplurge comes with a community base where people can share their saving goals and achievements so you can keep motivating and inspiring each other to never stop.

Acorn

If you want to take your saving to the next level, why not get into investing to see your money grow? If investing sounds too complex and too costly, this app will let you start in a quick and easy way by automatically taking spare change from your expenses and funneling it into a diversified investment portfolio.

How exactly does it work? Every time you make a purchase using a card connected to the app, Acorn will round your payment off to the next whole number and automatically invest that amount into a portfolio of low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs), depending on your risk preferences. We promise, you won’t even feel that you’re saving until you see how much money you’ve raised at the end of the month!

Debt Payoff

When you’ve gone a little overboard on your spending and your credit card bills, then you might want to get this app that will help you reduce and settle your debts. Debt Payoff uses the debt snowball method of settling debts, which works by making you settle the smallest debts first to get you on the momentum of paying the bigger ones.

This app lets you pay your debts more efficiently by setting payment schemes according to your loans’ interest rates, too. It has a built-in amortization table, mortgage calculator, loan calculator, and payoff date calculator so you can visualize the interest, principal, and remaining balances and payments of each of your loans.

The key to settling debts is to be smart about which ones to pay first depending on the interests and fees that come with the debts. With the app, you don’t get overwhelmed by everything you need to pay and you get to organize and see clearly what you can afford at the moment.