In the digital age, nobody likes carrying a lot of cash around – I know I don’t, anyway. This can be especially frustrating when you go to keep track of your expenses, who you owe money to, who you lent some to and just where it all goes over the month.
As always, there are a lot of apps out there to help you do various things with your money. There are apps to figure out how to manage your money, oversee expenses, send money to people, keep track of who owes you, and more.
In this article, I’ll show you some of the applications you can take advantage of to do everything I’ve mentioned here, leaving you free to pick and choose the apps that will make your life easier.
How to Manage Your Money
I’m beginning to learn just how difficult managing your expenses can be. For the most part, I use my debit card tied to my checking account to make purchases. I use it at the grocery store, when I go out to lunch with my coworkers and on the weekend when I’m out exploring the city.
At the end of the month, my bank statement looks pretty ridiculous. All of these small transactions make it difficult to sift through. I still know what everything is, but if I wanted to see where I could be saving some money I wouldn’t know the first place to look.
Sounds like you? Even if it doesn’t, you could still reap the benefits of visually being able to manage your money. These apps make the process a lot easier.
Mint
Mint has been on our radar since back in 2007 when Karl wrote about it. Plain and simple, if there is one app I want you to keep in mind it’s this one.
Mint is a free personal finance application that can help you compare your bank accounts, credit cards, CDs, brokerage and 401(k) to the best products out there. It offers a visual representation of your finances and is very easy to set up. Use it to manage your budget, get credit card advice and understand investing.
Here’s a great video showcasing an overview of Mint’s features:
For some helpful tips on how to use Mint, check out Bakari’s article on How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online.
Thrive
Thrive (directory app) is also a great application if you’re looking for a simple way to keep track of your spending. With Thrive, you get an overall Financial Health score, which is one number that shows you how financially fit you are. It also shows you scores in other areas and offers you advice on how to make improvements.
Thrive breaks down your spending for you and shows you where you can save. Compare your current budget to last month’s, as well as view a six month average and target budgets to follow.
Texthog
Looking for an even simpler way to track expenses? Texthog (directory app) lets you easily store, organize and access your receipts, expense reports and more via text message, the web, your email, iPhone and even Twitter.
A Texthog free account gives one user the ability to track expenses, view unlimited reports and get budget/bill reminders. Take a photo of your receipts and utilize tags and categories to keep track of everything.
To check out Texthog on your iPhone, you can find the application on iTunes.
Venmo
Speaking of text messages, have you heard of Venmo? Venmo (directory app) is a nice little app that lets you pay and charge friends with your phone. Send and receive secure payments by linking your card to your account. This allows you to settle small loans you give/get by eliminating paper transactions for small amounts of money.
To use Venmo, all you do is create an account. You can then send and receive money to other accounts simply by using text commands in SMS. Accept a “trust” request from your friends and make transactions without having to authorize them by texting a 3 digit code.
This is a pretty solid application that I have been using a lot lately with my friends/coworkers. It’s great for when a bunch of you are out to lunch and not everyone has cash on them. “I’ll just put it on my card and Venmo you all afterwards.”
Owe Me Cash
Owe Me Cash is a nice app I found recently that is also very easy to use. If someone owes you money, you just sign into Owe Me Cash with your Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or regular account and tell the app about the debt. The app will send automatic reminders to those that owe you money by phone, text and email, so you can get paid!
This app is more fun than serious, but it doubles as an easy way to keep track of who owes you what. Let the app bug your friends to pay you so you don’t have to do it yourself – it’s a win-win.
Conclusion
With these applications, your finances will never look better. Say goodbye to paper money and change.
What do you think of these money-managing applications? Will you be using any of them?
Image Credit: marema
Whilethe financial crisis has forced Canadians to come to grips with the
idea that a pension may not be a promise, employee benefits are
similarly in peril.
"I find it almost incomprehensible that Nortel
LTD (long-term disability) claimants could lose their benefits, but
this is possible; let alone losing their health care and a portion of
their pensions," said Kevin Dougherty, president of Sun Life Financial
Canada, speaking at the Canadian Pension and Benefits Institute
conference.
"We saw how benefits and pensions can literally disappear in an instant."
Now people nearing retirement face a new twist.
"Millions
of people asked the questions, what if I have to leave the workforce
five or 10 years early, or what if I have to stay in the workforce five
or 10 years more."
The leading edge of baby boomers will hit age 65 next year, when each day a thousand people in Canada will retire.
"Today
with boomers age 50 to 65, with kids grown and many through school,
the question they're asking isn't 'what if I die,' it's 'what if I
live?' That saps my income and retirement savings. What if I have to
live through another financial crisis?"
Dougherty joins federal
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney
in worrying about the growing debt Canadians are piling up.
"How
can we be the only place in the developed world where real estate
prices continued to increase for the last two-and-a-half years? What
does that mean? - more and more debt for Canadians."
While
Canadians who can't resist a bargain stock up on moulding empty homes
in the United States, there is fear that the Home Equity Line Of Credit
or HELOC could do in Canada what subprime mortgages did in the U.S.
Of course, retirement won't affect all people the same.
"Women
who are widowed early in retirement actually live three years longer
(than those who aren't), and men widowed early in retirement live three
years less."
While more and more companies with underfunded
pension plans have been reducing benefits and commuted value payouts,
the malaise has spread to employment benefits. Many firms offer minimal
health-care coverage in retirement or have eliminated it, while more
and more current employees find themselves on the hook to find vision
and dental insurance.
Meanwhile, the average number of days lost annually to sickness per worker has risen from eight in 1989 to 13 in 2009.
Dougherty's
conclusion is that neither government nor lawyers will take care of an
aging workforce, "and the next generation of children is not going to
want to take care of us."
He said
there is more onus on people in the pension and benefits and human
resources areas to devise products and provide advice.
"Our
industry needs to be much more than just helping to attract and retain
employees. The financial security of millions of Canadians depends on
the work we do."
One such move is encouraging government to establish a new personal health- savings account.
"We've
been advocating something called the registered health savings plan,
where people can save money on a pre-tax basis to be used for their
health-care costs in retirement. There are other examples like critical
illness insurance. But we've got to step up to this. I think this is
going to be one of the big areas of the future."
Even
with defined contribution pension plans, where investment risk lies
with the individual, the employers can provide advice through plan
sponsors.
"Narrowing the field from 4,000 fund managers to 12 is
providing advice. Overseeing and switching out of managers is providing
advice. Setting a level of contribution and matching is providing
advice. Providing tools that ask questions and lead people to
recommendations is providing advice."
But there is need to help
educate people about financial literacy, abetting the federal
government's task force on the issue that has been touring Canadians for
submissions and will issue a report in December.
"The most
striking finding is the degree of the challenge that we have, the
surprising lack of financial literacy in the general population is
really, really striking," Dougherty said.
"There's a challenge in
literacy - reading and writing in English, because we have such large
immigration; a challenge in numeracy, lots of people don't like working
with numbers; and you layer on top of that the knowledge and skills of
financial consequences."
All this is set against a backdrop in
which the financial crisis produced severe stock market downturns that
scared individuals from investing personally, while corporations were
similarly spooked and didn't invest in technology to improve
productivity and grow their workforces.
"There
was a two-year period in which we didn't invest, and that's going to
hurt us for two to five years," said Glen Hodgson, chief economist of
the Conference Board of Canada. "Health care will soon emerge as a top
concern for Canadians. Aging is going to suck the life out of our
economy slowly."
But just as baby boomers were told 40 years ago
that the investment of the future would be "plastics," Hodgson has his
own tip: "India will be the next China, it will keep growing at eight
per cent for a number of years."
You can bet your hip replacement on it.
Finally, my favorite deflationist, Gary Shilling was interviewed on Yahoo's Teck Ticker on Monday warning us that the age of deleveraging is upon us:
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