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Everyone wants to save money and budget better, but now you can do it twice as fast with the best budgeting apps for college students.
We'll keep it simple.
Here are the best budgeting apps that can give you a hand so you can speed up the budgeting and saving process.
Just remember, managing your money doesn't have to be painful — in fact, it's almost fun with these free budgeting and saving apps.
We'll break this savings article in sections, click to skip ahead:
- Best Budgeting Apps
- Best Personal Finance Apps
- Best Credit Check Apps
- Best Savings Apps
- Best Debt Apps
- Best Passive Income Apps
- Best Investing Apps
- Best Gas Apps
- Best Shopping Apps
Best Budgeting Apps for College Students
Maybe you’ve exhausted all financial resources on the web. You’ve cut back on spending. And now you need to take the next step. Here are budgeting apps to help you save money — for today or tomorrow.
1. Digit
The Digit web and mobile apps make it genuinely painless to save money “in the background.” It works by keeping an eye on a linked personal checking account and saving small amounts of money at a time based on your incoming profit or wages.
2. Acorns
Like Digit, Acorns offers a mobile and web app. It too functions by saving small amounts of money automatically, this time by rounding up your purchases on a linked account or card and by investing the difference in your Acorns account. The service recently launched “Acorns Later” — a full-featured retirement account that that's perfect for anybody without an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
3. Qapital
Qapital is another mobile-focused savings app that makes automatic or manual deposits based on your income. But it goes a step further than some of the others by offering a social and family component, where you can save money as part of a group, as well as robust goal-setting features for when you have specific savings milestones in mind.
4. Cinch Financial
Cinch Financial first and foremost brands itself as a “minimalist” assistant for your entire financial life. Using algorithms that operate in the background, the app analyzes your financial life and creates a forecast of several practical, actionable steps you can take right now to improve your standing. The goal is to help you save money and get into better spending habits.
Best Personal Finance Apps
5. Mint
Like Clarity Money, Mint styles itself as your personal finance consigliere. By linking your major financial institutions and ATM cards, Mint delivers a top-down view of your entire financial life. You can build and fine-tune a budget, create an emergency fund and look over your credit score — all for free.
6. You Need a Budget
It's got an on-the-nose name, but maybe straightforwardness is exactly what you want in a financial app. You Need a Budget has long been a favorite because it makes it easy to account for all your spending, prioritize your expenses, understand basic and advanced budgeting techniques and save easily for unforeseen emergencies — or just a rainy day.
7. MoneyLion
The free MoneyLion app styles itself as a jack of all trades. It's a platform for managing your current finances, investing and keeping track of your credit score — all while you save money and plan for the future. A free account gets you saving and borrowing tips, while a MoneyLion Plus account opens up the app's suite of investment tools.
8. Chime
Chime brands itself as less of a mobile app and more a full-blown “alternative bank.” You can set your checking account to commit 10 percent of incoming paychecks to savings automatically. Additionally, some purchases you pay for using your Chime account are eligible for cash-back rewards.
Best Credit Check Apps
Checking your credit score is right at your fingertips using these two smartphone apps.
9. Credit Sesame
If your credit, or lack thereof, has been on your mind, you might find Credit Sesame as a jack of all trades for credit monitoring and even free identity theft protection. The result is an app that delivers helpful and timely advice, as well as alerts to help you keep your money safe.
10. Credit Karma
Sometimes, saving money for the future or a major purchase requires a little personal finance triage first. If that's the case, the Credit Karma app is a good starting point for anybody who wants to find out where they stand credit-wise and get some practical tips for improving it, saving money on ordinary expenses while you do so.
Best Savings Apps
Let's take a look at 4 apps that could help to put you on a more secure financial path and give your savings account a well-needed boost.
11. Long Game
Making the most of your income over a lifetime requires you to play the “long game” — hence the name of this app. Long Game is a fully featured savings account that rewards you with cash and cryptocurrency rewards. Saving money in your account earns you playing time in fun, interactive games and the chance to earn additional cash prizes. You can withdraw your money anytime, just like a regular savings account. Click here for $5 bonus to get you started.
12. Clarity Money
No matter the skill, sometimes we need some coaching — and saving money is no different when looking for the best budget app. The Clarity Money app helps you find and cancel hidden recurring expenses like subscriptions and bad habits. It'll also deliver insights — using a web or mobile app — about negotiating your costs lower and suggesting financial products that could help, based on your profile.
13. Trim
Trim makes the bold claim that its machine-learning-facilitated app platform saves its users $1 million per month. How? By looking over your finances and canceling unused subscriptions, finding more affordable utility and service providers and generally looking for waste and redundancy. Give it a try.
Best Debt App
Here is one of the best debt repayment tools and apps to help you pay down debt quickly and stay motivated to reach the long-term goal of becoming debt free.
14. Tally
Credit card debt is the bane of many consumers' existences. Tally is an app designed to help those with credit card debt track and pay it all off in a timely, responsible manner so you can get your finances back on track. Without harming your credit score, Tally analyzes your finances and opens a line of credit for you to automatically pay off your debt for you at a rate you can manage.
Best Passive Income Apps
Looking to generate passive income with your PC or mobile phone? Check out my favorite 5 ways to easily make money online.
15. Swagbucks
If you're looking for a way to browse for cool deals, search for specific items, conduct paid surveys and generally earn a little bit back on all the shopping research you'd be doing anyway, Swagbucks is for you. After you link a PayPal account, most of your activity on the app — from doing product searches to providing marketing feedback — helps you earn points toward cash rewards.
16. Fundrise
Fundrise is a low-cost investment platform for web and mobile that's specifically designed for real estate investors. And it's not just an app, either — it's a professional investment guidance service. Professionals look at thousands of real estate opportunities across the country and help you diversify your portfolio and keep an eye on site progress at your investment properties, all at the same time.
17. MyPoints
MyPoints is another app that gets you paid just for answering simple questions about your purchasing habits. Your first survey should take about three minutes and will earn you 10 points in the process. After that, you can earn additional points and other rewards by playing games, watching videos and clipping coupons.
Best Investing Apps
Want to make money the smart way? These 5 investing apps can increase your portfolio and more importantly, your net worth.
18. M1 Finance
M1 Finance empowers you to manage your money and build wealth with ease. Just create and automate your portfolio and they take care of the rest. Also, it's totally free to use and download.
19. Fidelity
Whether you have an employer-backed retirement account or a personal Roth IRA, there's a good chance you manage it through Fidelity. Using the mobile and web app, it's easy to watch your accounts grow or make additional one-time investments in your future as often as you can afford to do so.
20. Bank of America
As the name suggests, Bank of America is one of the biggest financial institutions in the country. And they've recently upped their game for savings and checking account holders by adding a “Keep the Change” feature to their account apps. This program rounds up your purchases to a whole-dollar amount and saves these small amounts as deposits to your savings account.
21. Robinhood
In underprepared hands, a stock trading app is a money-loser rather than a money-saver. Robinhood offers free stock and bond trading and an intuitive interface, so it's a smart way to play the market while saving the money you'd otherwise lose to commissions.
Best Gas Apps
Want to discover the best deals for gas near you? With cheap gas apps, you'll be smiling all the way to the gas pump with these two gas apps.
22. Upside
Shopping local can put you back in touch with your community and help you uncover hidden gems. But you still want to get the best deals, which is why Upside is so helpful. The app maintains a local focus and points you toward discounts in your local area on the products you’d be buying anyway, like groceries and gas.
23. GasBuddy
If somebody out there enjoys buying — and overpaying for — gasoline, we've never met them. That's what GasBuddy is for. It offers several tools for frugal drivers. First, it'll show you the lowest gas prices near you. You can also use it to calculate MPG. Or, for long road trips, you can find the best gas prices in advance and add them as stops on your itinerary.
Best Shopping Apps
Everyone is looking for ways to save or make extra money, so here are 12 of the best cashback apps and shopping apps you can use to save.
24. Ibotta
You can probably file this one under “sounds too good to be true, but isn't.” Ibotta is an app that works with 250 major retailers, including big-box stores, to help you get some money back, retroactively, on purchases you already make regularly. Some users report savings of up to $25 in their first month without changing their shopping habits.
25. Checkout 51
Checkout 51 is an excellent tool for anybody who frequently shops for household groceries and other items. Using the app is easy — you create a free account and then upload receipts of purchases you've made for qualifying items. Checkout 51 keeps a continually updated list of manufacturer deals and sends you cash back any time you buy something for which there's a posted deal.
26. Honey
Honey is a browser extension for Safari, Firefox and Chrome, rather than a standalone mobile or web app — but it's a potential money-saver just the same. After you install it, Honey keeps an eye on the checkout process at major Internet retailers and automatically finds current coupon codes to apply to your order.
27. OpenTable
Nothing is frugal about dining out in restaurants — but if you do it right, even infrequent visits could help you earn back a little something. OpenTable is an app that makes securing table reservations on a mobile device painless. However, you also earn points for each reservation and can cash out for affiliated restaurant gift cards or Amazon gift codes.
28. Poshmark
You can think of the Poshmark app a little like a high-end thrift store. It's a mobile-first peer-to-peer digital marketplace where people can buy, swap and sell clothing, footwear and fashion accessories by sought-after and luxury brands, sometimes for 70 percent off the “rack price.” For items where counterfeiting is a worry, Poshmark offers authenticity checks for purchases more than $500.
29. Rakuten
Rakuten functions a little like an outlet store for 2,500 Internet retailers. By making Rakuten your “shopping portal,” either through the web app or a browser extension, you have access to thousands of great deals — up to 40 percent off — on almost anything you can imagine, straight from your retailers of choice. You can also get cash back on your purchases.
Best Budgeting Apps for College Students Summary
Many of these budgeting and money-saving apps for college students offer help to let you build up savings over time.
In fact, these saving apps help change your mindset about money and provide valuable ongoing lessons about financial wellness that can keep you out of debt and on the road to saving more money for today and tomorrow.
Your financial independence completely depends on how you feel about your life. If you don't feel motivated then you need to change something in your life. Your most of life will be utilized in working so better you have something in hand which you passionate about. The life is a roller coaster ride so there will be good days and bad days. To enjoy financial independence, you should have planned for both the situation. The money will play a big role in securing your future. Your focus should be balancing the money and passion equally to live the movement at the fullest.
Leave your thoughts below. Share with me how you manage your financial goal and what is financial independence to you?
Good luck!
