Struggling to Learn How to Live on a Budget? Meet Your Financial Goals with These Helpful (And Free!) Apps

Federation To Protect
4 min readAug 12, 2016

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Many people today often believe that the only way to succeed financially is to keep increasing their future income without bothering to carefully manage the income they currently have. This can lead to some poor financial decisions along the way, such as relying on credit cards or taking on too much debt for student loans, vehicles and other purchases. While advancing a career or developing a successful business is an excellent part of overall financial success, it is entirely possible to improve your financial health without actually becoming a highly paid corporate executive or inventing the next ultra-popular widget.

In fact, when studying millionaires for his book, Thomas J. Stanley, the author of “The Millionaire Next Door”, discovered that most everyone interviewed became financially successful by working in relatively common occupations or businesses, living frugally and taking complete control of every dollar they earned. In most cases, these millionaires were living nearly as frugally at the time of the interview as they chose to live at the time they first began working toward financial success.

In their interviews, most spoke of the need to manage each dollar carefully throughout their lives and had no intentions of having an excessive life style once they achieved success, just because they now could afford to do so. If you are struggling financially and would like to learn how to control your money and use it as a tool to further your family’s financial future, learning to live on a budget is the first step and these free apps can help!

Apps to Help with Wise Money Management

  • Mint — an app with capabilities for both budgeting and tracking your complete financial picture, Mint provides up-to-date information on account balances, investments, purchases and bill payments and is available for use on most computers and smart phones. It can be securely linked to banking and other accounts and will even make helpful recommendations based on your lifestyle and financial goals.
  • Digit — saving, even a tiny bit at a time, can really add up so Digit has created an app that connects to the user’s bank accounts, tracks spending and automatically takes out a small amount of money and moves it to a savings account. Since the app makes the savings decision for you in an amount that it determines you can afford, your savings can build up without any hesitation or second-guessing on your part. Based on text messages, Digit works on smart phones, as well as other cell phones capable of text messaging.
  • Every Dollar — created to empower beginning budgeters and help them take total control over their finances, including debt repayment, savings, investing, planning for retirement and creating an emergency fund, Every Dollar provides an easy to use dashboard that can be easily accessed from both computers and smart phones. In addition to tracking every area of your family’s financial picture, this app can also connect with bank accounts to help track savings and spending and offers visual tracking of your progress to help with empowerment and motivation.
  • Acorns — investing is one of the areas that people often struggle with when trying to improve their finances and the Acorns app was designed to help solve this problem by using your digital “spare change” to automatically invest into a diversified portfolio of investments. In addition, you can also make additional deposits into your investment portfolio or withdraw funds in specified amounts at any time. The app automatically rounds up your expenses to the next highest dollar amount and then uses this small amount of excess money to invest. * The Acorns app is completely free, however, there is a fee of $1.00 per month to use the investment option. If you are a student, however, the investment portion of the app can continue to be used at no charge.
  • Penny — if budgeting seems like a maze that you will never be able to successfully navigate the Penny app may be perfect for you! Designed to act as your personal financial coach, Penny, works via a chat interface to track your finances and offer you timely facts and advice about your current spending habits and how you can improve them in the future. If you are uncomfortable discussing your finances in person or just want a little extra guidance, this free app can be used on both iPhone and Android smart phones, tablets and computers.

Apps can be a great way to learn about budgeting while providing an enjoyable experience to help you improve your overall financial situation. Sometimes, however, a personal touch is still wanted or needed. If you have questions or concerns about creating or living on a budget or have additional financial questions or concerns, help is available through mentoring programs within your community or church or through online consumer protection and help organizations. While financial stress is a common problem in today’s economy, it is not a problem that you must bear alone. With dedication and careful guidance, you can start to improve your current financial situation with what you have right now.*

*This article provides broad and general guidelines and does not constitute professional or legal advice. You should not use this article as a substitute for your own judgment, and you should consult professional advisers before making any advertising, tax, legal, financial planning or investment decisions.

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Federation To Protect
Federation To Protect

Written by Federation To Protect

The Federation To Protect is a non-profit organization created with the purpose to provide responsible options to ensure consumers’ trust.

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