You may be able to manage your money a little better if you were not buying apps. Nevertheless here are five apps you may use to manage your money with your iPhone. The apps listed are good for different purposes, but are primarily personal finance tools that help solve problems a single individual may face. Here are the different purposes the apps serve–followed by their descriptions and comments.
Pocket Money – A money management tool that requires little input.
Mint – A money management tool that allows bank synchronization for free.
Splash Money – A money management tool that allows bank synchronization for a fee.
Bloomberg – A money management tool primarily for investors.
CheckPlease Lite – A money management tool that helps you divide up a meal bill and work out the tip.
Pocket Money – Free (kinda)
This app is pretty handy because it does not ask you to input a lot of data. As we all know–if we had time to enter buckets and buckets of information about or money movements into an app, then we would have time to sit down, plan a budget and stick to it. Nevertheless this app asks for little input. In return for your input it will give you account details, budgets, spending analysis and will also you to export this data to other software for further use. There is a free version with fewer features, and a paid version has had its price jump up and down like a custom essay about a kangaroo with a bum full of rocket fuel.
Mint – Free
Online at the moment, if you were to Google a money management app you would probably see a lot of positive reviews for the Mint app. It seems to be very well received. So, either it is a great app, or the company has a great PR team, marketing team and reputation management team. A precursory play with the app (for reviewing purposes) seems to back up the maker’s claims.
It is an app that follows your bank account and enters your purchases and incoming money into your balance sheet and budget automatically. It will also send you a real-time alter if you have gone over the budget you set for yourself, or for if one of your accounts has a low balance. The only head-scratcher about this app is why it is so sophisticated and yet free. The designers have clearly done a lot of work for it, so how were they paid for their efforts?
Splash Money – Paid
This is an app with a few money management features. It is a personal finance tool so will help you set household budgets, fuel budgets etc. There are a lot of tools that probably took a lot of designing. This is probably why it is not free. There is also the option to connect wirelessly to your bank via an encrypted route.
Encrypted is very important because wireless is not exactly 100% secure. You may also purchase the PC version and synchronize them too. The fact you have to pay them to use the app (as low as $5) does offer a little more reassurance than the mint.com app, because it gives the manufacturers a financial incentive to make sure their app is secure and bug free.
Bloomberg App – Free
This allows you to track your investments. It will also give you the latest news via audio and text. It allows you to watch certain companies, track their progress, and even creates charts for you, so that you can either buy or sell based upon them.
The degree of personalization means you may become very comfortable with using this app on a regular basis. This is a big plus if you are buying/selling shares and want to watch for the peaks and troughs wherever you are. They have also made it in 12 languages too.
Check Please Lite – Free
This is a very simple calculator app that will help you dividing up the bill for a meal, and will also help you to work out the tip too. The app is free because they advertise on it with a banner running across the top. For just 99c you can remove the marketing banner.