Make Budgeting Easier in 2016

Summary: A budget of any kind is an essential tool in order to keep your finances in check and understand where your money goes each month.

New Year’s Resolutions for most of us usually involve money in some way – make more, save more, spend less, etc. If you fit into this group and want to address your financial situation this year then consider using one or more of these apps to help you save money by creating a budget that works for you.

– Mint

Link all your financial information into one place including credit cards, student loans, bank accounts, and bills so that you can follow where you spend your money. Set specific budgets for different categories so that you can be sure to keep your coffee spending under control.

– You Need a Budget

There are four rules for success: plan for bigger and unexpected expenses, give every penny a job, roll with the punches, and live on last month’s income. There is a one-time $60 fee but you can test it out for free first.

– Pocketsmith

This budget program is to help make retirement a reality. Plan for the future by seeing what your daily bank balances will look in thirty years, schedule bills, divide your budget into time periods, and test financial decisions in a what-if case to see what the outcome would look like.

– Buxfer

This program is one of the more secure ones if you are worried about that. You upload bank statements instead of entering sensitive passwords and all personal information is stored on your computer, not a server. They are connected with Amazon Payments so it is also super easy to pay back friends any money you owe or vice versa.

– Ready for Zero

Get your payment plans for credit cards and loans organized into a simple pay-off plan. First link your debts, figure out what you owe, and then you will receive a personalize plan to pay off your debt.

– Level Money

Visually seeing your spending habits is very important for some. See how much money you have, how much you spent, and what you have left in a simple layout.

– Mvelopes

Consider this program a virtual version of the classic envelope method of budgeting. In the classic method you set aside envelopes with cash inside for each budget like groceries, rent, gas, etc. Now you can do this virtually so that you don’t have to worry about losing your envelope.

– Wally

Compare your income to your expenses, set and achieve goals, and determine how to better spend your money with this program. One bonus to this program is being able to save images of your receipts for records.

– EveryDollar

Dave Ramsey’s app works with his Baby Steps program to help users get rid of debt for good. The most used feature of this app is the day-to-day expense budgeting.

– Spendee

This app tries to make budgeting a little more fun by using your choice of wallets to organize categories. Wallets can be shared with family and friends, transactions filtered to easy-to-see categories, and visualize your spending on a Google map-like layout.

Photo: forbes.com