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Wouldn’t it be great to have a personal finance manager – someone who would track your expenses, balance you checkbook, watch your investments and tell you when to pay a bill?
Sound pretty good to you?
Yes, you can
To borrow a political motto from four years ago, yes you can – have a personal finance manager and you can keep it in your pocket.
The secret is to get one of the many great finance manager apps available for smart phones – both iPhone and Android-based phones.
For the iPhone
If you have an iPhone, you should check into the apps AceBudget, Personal Assistant Premium and Grocery Gadget.
AceBudget is an excellent app for doing just what its name suggests – creating a budget and tracking expenses. It has a simple interface and will generate a bunch of useful reports designed to help you better manage your money.
You can track just about everything in your financial life with Personal Assistant Pro. And it tracks them all in one place – including your checking account(s), savings accounts, cell phone use, and even your Amazon account.
The app Accounts is basically a checkbook register. You create accounts, type in an initial balance and then enter your transactions. Accounts will automatically keep your “checkbook” balanced and you can export its data to a spreadsheet or email it to yourself.
Grocery Gadget is a nice little app that lets you set up grocery lists and then send them to your iPhone. If you have a 3GS or newer you can even use the app’s barcode scanner to scan in prices so you’ll know exactly how much you’re spending on the groceries you buy.
Android-based phones
There are also some great finance manager apps for Android-based phones. One of the most popular of these is Loot, which like the iPhone app Accounts, lets you enter your deposits and purchases so you’ll always know your balance.
You can save money on food with the app My Coupons. This clever, little app automatically sends a list of coupons to your Android phone daily. It can be used to find local deals. You can scan in the barcodes of items and it will tell you if there coupons available that would save you money.
Another helpful app for Android phone is EasyMoney. It will let you create customizable financial reports, transfers between accounts, create recurring transactions, color coded budgets (making them easier to read) and will even notify you if you have an overdue bill.
A neat, free app for Android phones is Nickel Tracker. It’s designed around the old “envelopes” way to budget. You create categories with spending limits and Nickel Tracker will send you an alert any time your spending exceeds the amount of money you’ve budgeted in a category.
If you’re seriously in debt
Unfortunately, there’s no app that can help if you’re over your head in debt. But there is a website that can help – NationalDebtRelief.com. We do debt settlement, a program that has helped many families get out of debt and live better, happier lives. You can learn all about debt settlement and how it might help you more than a personal money manager.
