If you find yourself constantly picking up your iPhone, you’re not alone. Many iPhone owners are addicted to checking text messages, work emails, weather alerts, sports scores and more. Many people are discovering, however, that there are more useful ways of making their phone work for them, such as managing their finances, working within a budget, making investment decisions, and managing money. Each of these activities has been made easier than ever before, thanks to some very useful personal finance apps. Here are three apps that help iPhone users to take control of their finances.
Mint: Money management
Mint, from Intuit Inc. (INTU) – the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks – is a one-stop resource for getting smart about your finances, tracking spending, and creating a budget. You can link your credit card and bank accounts, and bills, so that all your financial accounts can be accessed one place, meaning that you don’t have to log in to each individual website.
Mint reminds you when you’re due to pay your bills, the amount that you owe, and the amount that you can pay. It also helps you to avoid late payment fees by sending out payment reminders. It even offers advice to better control your budget, based on your personal spending habits.
IG: Online trading
The IG app provides a secure and user-friendly platform to access hundreds of different markets, including indices, forex, and stocks. It displays analysis and data on these markets and provides regular updates to provide the very best trading experience possible.
Among other things, IG are CFD brokers; Australia 200, Wall Street, and the FTSE 100 being just some of the markets that users can trade in. The app also offers online seminars, webinars and courses to help you learn the basics to advanced levels of trading. Setting up an account is free and takes just a few minutes.
You Need a Budget: Debt management
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The You Need a Budget app is unique from other budgeting apps. It helps you to stop living from paycheck to paycheck and assists you in gradually ridding yourself of debt.
The app doesn’t allow you to create budgets based on money that you don’t have- it gives you no choice but to live within your means. If you veer off course (and we all do from time to time), YNAB helps you to work out what changes you should make in order to balance your budget. While there’s a small fee for the app, both the support and the service itself are more than worth it. Web-based training with an instructor to answer your questions and help you understand the basics of budgeting is included.
With so many personal finance apps at your fingertips, you have no excuse not to make an informed decision at any time and in any place. You can check your balance while in line at the grocery store, create a budget on your lunch break at the park, or file your taxes on that long train journey home. Start small until using these apps becomes a habit, and you will gradually come to see that money management isn’t the complex beast you may have imagined it to be.
With an ever-growing portfolio of financial apps available for the iPhone, you’ll never be more than an app away from managing your money more efficiently.
