Budgeting Apps: Our Five Favourite Apps To Help You Manage Your Money
Budgeting shouldn’t feel like a chore. Apps can be an excellent way to make your budgeting more fun and easier too! We have collated five of our favourite budgeting apps that you can use to build healthier financial habits.
What is budgeting, and why should you do it?
Budgeting is the process of building a plan of how and where you could spend your money. The plan you create is called a budget. A budget can be helpful for a number of reasons:
- Helps you to reach financial targets
- Ensures you have a sufficient amount of money for the things you need
- Could help you to manage debt & stay out of it
- Gives you a clear understanding of your income & outgoings
Apps can be a great way to make budgeting simple and fun.
What should you include in a budget?
A budget should give you a clear picture of your spending habits, income and outgoings for the coming month. Make sure to include these when budgeting:
- The total sum of money you have coming in each month
- Your fixed expenses (rent, mortgage, utilities, car payments, insurance)
- Your variable expenses (food, travel, entertainment)
- Your financial goals (savings)
The following apps vary in features, but all are loved amongst users in the UK.
Plum
Plum is an app that focuses on saving and investing money, managing your budget, and finding better deals on household bills. Plum gives you control over your personal finances through Open Banking. By connecting your bank account and credit cards to the app, Plum analyses your transaction history to find areas for saving money. Plum uses a sophisticated algorithm to analyse your spending and can help you save without even realising it, allowing you to earn 0.40% interest on your savings.
Building your budget: Plum helps you manage your budget by giving you a full picture of your finances. Keeping track of regular payments and expenses is simple with Plum since you can connect your bank accounts and credit cards. The connection is made via Open Banking, a secure connection that allows third parties to view your banking transactions. In Plum's in-app features, users can automatically pay themselves first on payday, adding a lump sum to their Plum account when the salary reaches their account.
The app provides an overview of your finances, lets you filter your transactions by account, and finds specific retailers in just a few taps. Combining this feature with their money-management features, such as Money Maximiser, will allow you to make better financial decisions by tracking your spending in real-time.
Additionally, Money Maximiser can help you offset the effects of inflation. During this process, your money is seamlessly moved to your savings pocket, earning interest (maximizing interest), after which a weekly cashback payment is sent to your everyday bank account to cover your purchases.
Features: Plum lets you automatically save money through 'automatic saving' using artificial intelligence enabling users to save affordable amounts each month. Unlike other apps, Plum offers an adjustable moods feature enabling users to control the amount of savings they intend to make, from 'shy' to 'beast mode'. Savings can be made easy and straightforward with payday savings, allowing users to pre-set amounts and have them automatically deducted.
Cons: There are some features included in plum that are not included in their free services. Additionally, money in the primary pocket isn’t protected by the financial service compensation scheme (FSCS), you may find this is the case with many other budgeting apps.
Cost: There are four levels of Plum accounts, from the 'Plum basic' plan (£1 month) to the Plum ultra-plan (£4.99 month). In each tier, users get access to various in-app features.
Emma
The Emma app works like a personal financial adviser. It tracks your expenses and outgoings across all your accounts, showing how you spend your money and flagging any wasteful payments. The app shows your real-time balances and how much is left in your budget. It does this by deducting committed spending from your income, having worked out your committed spending by taking your direct debits into account, as well as cleverly picking up on your regular spending habits.
Building your budget: In the analytics section, select “budgets” and set up a custom amount for all your spending categories such as bills, food, and transport. You can choose if you want the budget to go from payday to payday, or from month beginning to month end. You can set a budget by category – so you can “bucket” a certain amount for eating out or entertainment.
Features: Emma lets you track exactly when and why banks have charged you fees such as overdraft charges, fixed account fees and foreign transaction costs. It lets you know which one of your providers is “ripping you off the most.”
The visualisations within the Emma app are clean, intuitive, and detailed. They give great insights on the dashboard page giving you a snapshot of areas to focus on. You can also easily view your spending over time, per category and against your budget.
Cons: Emma comes with downsides such as no comparison features. This means you can’t compare spending week-by-week, or month-by-month, which makes it harder to track changes in spending habits. The app also lacks a ‘savings’ category.
Cost: The basic services of Emma are free. There are premium options available, the Emma Pro subscription price starts at £4.99 per month. Other packages and add-ons are available, please see the app for full details. Also note that prices can vary if you are outside the UK.
Money Dashboard
Money Dashboard has over half a million users and was launched in 2010 – at a time when mobile banking didn’t exist. It is a personal finance and budgeting tool that links up to all of your bank accounts. The application is usable on mobile and desktop.
Building your budget: You can set up an overall budget by going to ‘overview’, pressing on ‘budgets’ at the head of the screen and then selecting ‘create budget’. From here, you can click ‘select all’ and ‘continue’ which will calculate your average spend in each category. You can easily modify this to suit your spending habits and financial goals.
Features: Unlike many apps on this list, Money Dashboard is completely free. This app includes features such as custom categories for budgeting. The app also lets you set financial goals, such as saving for a holiday, which you can incorporate into your budget.
The app brings your accounts onto one platform, which means a smooth, efficient, and safe overview of your day-to-day finances. This feature is especially helpful to people with many bank accounts and credit cards. The "balance after bills" feature predicts your future spending and lets you know how much you should be spending to avoid going into an overdraft.
Cons: Money Dashboard is less automatic than other apps, manual manipulation (such as custom categories) during set up. However, some may find this helpful, as it means you can get the app to work exactly how you see it most useful.
Cost: Free
MoneyHub
Moneyhub is an app for managing your money that uses open banking to access all of your bank, saving, credit, and investment accounts. Founded in 2013, the company provides financial management solutions to individuals, financial professionals, and enterprises.
Moneyhub allows you to see all of your money in one place, providing powerful insights into your spending habits and reminders to help you meet your self-assigned goals and pay your bills on time. Using open banking, Moneyhub can access your bank account details since it is connected to your account through your bank.
Building your budget: Moneyhub helps you keep track of all your money by using insights into your spending habits. By connecting your bank accounts via Open Banking, Moneyhub can access your account information and transactions, allowing users to take control of their finances and build a calculated budget.
Features: Moneyhub's app offers unique features like 'nudges' that will help you stay on top of your finances. With the nudge tool, users receive reminders when payments are due and tips on saving money on credit cards and mortgages. Through detailed spending categorization and comparison, Moneyhub provides users with detailed spending analysis. In addition, they offer features such as adding spending goals and splitting transactions while on the app.
Cons: The only downside to this app is that there are no options to use the app without any extra costs attached. Furthermore, the function of finding advisors lacks information and clarity.
Cost: Money hub offers two methods of subscription:
- Through desktop, users can either opt to pay monthly at 99p or annually at £9.99
- Alternatively, users can subscribe via the AppStore at the cost of £1.49 per month or £14.99 per year.
Snoop
Snoop connects to over 50 banks and lets you see your accounts in one place using Open Banking technology. It allows you to set custom alerts to keep an eye on the things most important to you.
Building your budget: Using an app like Snoop will allow you to track and identify your spending habits and compares them to last month. Having personalised money-saving tips could help you manage your budget better. The app allows you to create your own categories to track how much you’ve spent on certain things which can be helpful when looking to cut back on costs.
Features: A standout feature is an in-app energy, mortgage and broadband switching suggestion. This feature allows you to find better deals, such as saving money on your electricity bills by reminding you when to start looking at cheaper alternatives. It has weekly and monthly spending summaries, daily balance alerts, and a bill tracking function.
Cons: It’s a relatively young app and still developing; they have a handy online page that lets you know how they perform 24/7.
Cost: Free (Snoop Plus, which offers additional features, costs £3.99 a month)
Final Thoughts
When starting to budget, you should choose the app that you think fits best with your finances. For simple budgets, or if you are a complete beginner, easy-to-use apps like Emma may work best for you. If your finances are more challenging and complicated, the customisation features that come with Money Dashboard could be the most helpful.
And finally, a word of caution, money held by payment providers and e-money providers such as prepaid card accounts are not covered by the FSCS. See "Prepaid cards: How safe is your money?". However, you may find many budgeting apps allow you to put money in different accounts (for example, savings accounts), where other firms hold your money. It's worth checking if these other firms are covered by the FSCS, particularly if you have a large amount of money in these. If you're unsure, check with your provider, you can also use the FSCS bank & savings protection checker.