In this day and age, there are no more excuses for not having a personal budget laid out. The apps and tools available to you, often for free, are cheap, easy to use, and will make your life better. Here are four of our favorites, for iPhone:
1. Expenditure ($2)
With a clean interface and a few nice extra features, Expenditure makes expense tracking about as simple as it can get. You can pick your spending categories, add transactions, take notes, and even use photos to help you “keep an eye” on your spending. If you don’t want to get too bogged down with sophisticated reports and advanced information, Expenditure will keep things straightforward for you, and simply show you what you spent.
2. Mint (Free)
In the first annual app awards, Mint was awarded “Best Finance App.” You can’t go wrong with a free app that is also probably the best one out there. Mint pulls in account info in real time, lets you create and adjust budgets on the fly, and does everything you want it to do, in general.
3. iReconcile ($3)
iReconcile has a wealth of features that might be just what you’re looking for. In addition to the usual budgeting and transaction recording functions you might expect, iReconcile has advanced reporting, searching, exporting, and memorization functions that enrich the experience. iReconcile also offers sync and backup services to round out their product.
4. MoneyBook ($3)
MoneyBook boasts the usual set of features, but bills itself as “Finance with flair.” Is the app stylish enough to merit such a distinction? You be the judge!
No matter which app you use, the important thing is that you get tracking. (The sooner you track, the sooner you find out how much those awesome deals on Groupon are really costing you each month.)