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Health & Fitness

Apps for Budgeting

I was speaking at an event over the weekend and began my presentation with the following two questions.

1) Raise your hand if you consider yourself to be a finance expert or very knowledgeable about finance?

One person raised their hand

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2) Raise your hand if you think finance is important?

Every person raised their hand.

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Almost everyone can agree that personal financial planning, budgeting, and planning are all essential tools that people need to get control of their financial situation. Personal budgeting can be a tedious process, however, and people are busy with their day-to-day activities. Putting together a personal financial plan can seem like a daunting task – where do you even start? Excel is a wonderful tool that can help you begin to track your expenses on a daily basis. Simply go home at the end of the day and spend a few minutes entering the data into a spreadsheet. For some Excel tips just take a look at my weekly newsletter. All that being said, Excel can have a relatively steep learning curve, and I am sure that many people have experienced frustration with the software program.

Smartphones and tablets are becoming ubiquitous in modern society – everywhere you look there is someone scrolling, tweeting, or texting from either a touch screen phone or tablet device. These devices, however, can be transformed from gadgets/toys to powerful budgeting tools. There are a wide range of budgeting tools and programs that are available to people to utilize on their “smart” devices. Some of the more popular ones are listed below.

iPhone

MoneyWiz – keeps track of all your accounts/transactions and bills in one place.
Mint.com Personal Finance – allows you to manage all of your accounts from your phone.
Budget with Back in Black – an excellent option for managing expenses, and graphical representation make it easier to follow your money flows.

Android

Home Budget for Android – a comprehensive budgeting program, a top-to-bottom budget creator.
My Budget Book – shows the current combined balances in all of your accounts, current month’s bills, and has the ability to export the data seamlessly into Excel
Easy Envelope Budget Aid – an easy to use and intuitive budgeting tool that gives the user a very hands-on budgeting experience.

There are also many great budget programs for desktop computers, but I wanted to focus on applications and programs designed for smart devices and tablets.

Let’s see if we can make our smart devices work smarter for us!

What are the best budget tools you have used?

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