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Want to start saving for your dream vacation? Here are the best budgeting apps to help you

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This article was update on 5-23-2017 by Will Nicol to include Mobills and Money Lover.

There’s never a better time than now to start thinking about how you manage your money. It’s hard to know where to start, though, especially if you’re young and have no idea what your Roth IRA or 401K is. Don’t worry, these days there are all sorts of ways to make smart investments and better plan your financial life — all directly on your smartphone. Below are some of our favorite apps for budgeting your money, whether you’re looking to cut back on monthly expenditures or check your balance at a glance.

Personal Capital

Personal Capital app
If you want to stay on top of your investments, stocks, retirement savings, and bank accounts as well as budget your spending in a single app, then Personal Capital is the multi-platform financial portal for you. It’s also available online and on wearables. Rather than passively track your net worth across various institutions like Mint, this free app actively compares your stocks’ performance to the markets in real-time, thus allowing you to keep up to speed on your financial health. The app even provides access to a team of professionals who can offer more personalized advice to further grow your nest egg, though their optional services cost extra.

Download now for:

iOS Android

Mint

Best-Black-Friday-apps-Mint
Mint, Intuit’s personal finance app, is a lifesaver for keeping tabs on your overall financial health. This budget app links up with all your different bank accounts, loan accounts, credit cards, and shows them all within a single, streamlined interface. This is especially helpful with transaction searching, so you can figure out which card or account you used to buy something at the department store. The mobile iteration of Mint also syncs with the service’s robust web interface, and offers recommendations for new loan accounts and credit cards based on your habits. These features, combined with the app’s ability to show you upcoming bills at a glance, make it a standout.

Download now for:

iOS Android

Stash

Best-Black-Friday-apps-Mint
Another spare-change investment app on the horizon is Stash. You can invest in small increments — five dollars at a time, for instance — and across a variety of available portfolios, whether you prefer to do so manually or via automatic payments. The app is also built to accommodate the less-than-savvy investor, and as such, it includes educational tools that encourage you to develop smarter financial habits in the long run, so you can make sound investments and manage your money with aplomb. Stash will even help you discover companies that align with your values, so you can choose firms that are making strides in equality, ecology, and other issues.

Download now for:

iOS Android

Simple

Best-Black-Friday-apps-Mint
Looking for a bank that works with you to manage your money? Simple is an online bank that includes a bunch of money management tools to help you plan your spending and figure out how to keep within your means. Since it’s a fully fledged bank, you can manage your check deposits and other services directly within the app, and your debit card is free at more than 55,000 ATMs.

Download now for:

iOS Android

Money Lover

Money Lover is a free app — that comes with a string attached — that offers a clean, colorful interface and plenty of nifty features. This budgeting app allows you to get very granular with your expenses, and automatically categorizes spending on food, drinks, games, and anything else you might buy, with cute pictures to boot. The app also tracks your income and spending in the past, present, and future months, with everything displayed in an easy-to-read arrangement. The biggest problem with Money Lover is that the free version includes some annoying — and often times invasive — ads that clutter the otherwise splendid interface.

Download now for:

iOS Android

Mobills

Mobills promises fewer problems, with a simple interface and vibrant display. Oh, and the charts! Did we mention the charts? Mobills offers plenty of them, whether you need a pie chart laying out all your expenses proportionally, a line graph measuring your income over time, or anything other monetary metric you may want to encapsulate in a visual way. It even has a section for you to plan out your dreams, and see how long it will take to achieve them based on the money you set aside each month. The latter is a nice feature, at least until you see how long it will take you to save up for that vintage Westfalia.

Download now for:

iOS Android




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