Feeling a pinch when you need money is not an uncommon scenario. Even though you are not badly off, you find your savings sloppy to meet your expenses. Budgeting is the best way to stretch your penny as far as possible, but unfortunately, many of you do not have an idea of how to make a budget.
Manual budgeting is not just recording cash coming in and going out. Still, it instead means categorising your expenses to evaluate which one is largely responsible for eating up your money and where you can whittle down your expenses.
When you pay through cash and plastic, you often slip up, recording all expenses accurately. Many of you do not enjoy recording each entry manually and give up in the middle out of frustration.
Thanks to budgeting apps, you can get an insight into your current financial position without facing the inconvenience and hassle. Here are some of the budgeting apps that you can use if you are a Brit, and some of them are absolutely free:
- Snoop
It is a free budgeting that helps with keeping tabs on your expenses, slashing your bills, and stashing away money.
- The app will help you choose a variety of switching services for your car insurance, mobile, broadband, credit cards, mortgages and many more. These services will help save money on utilities.
- It allows you to link all your bank accounts to see all transactions in one place.
- You will track your spending on a category basis.
- In addition to weekly and monthly spending summaries, you will also get daily balance alerts.
It is easy to access and allows intelligent switching solutions. However, it is still in the developing stage. A lot more features could be added.
- Emma
It is a subscription-based app that lets you enjoy additional features like paying off debt and investing apart from budgeting and saving. Standard Emma is free, but you cannot access all features. However, Emma Plus costs £4.99 per month, the Pro costs £9.99 per month, and the Ultimate costs £14.99 per month.
- Take advantage of commission-free stock trading. You can start with investing as little as £1.
- You can pay and receive money instantly. You do not need to register with a third-party payment site.
- You can organise your money by allocating it to pots for different categories like Christmas gifts, farewell gifts, birthday parties, holiday tours and the like.
- You will be notified of the available balance in your account and in your pots.
- You can switch utility services and save a lot of money.
- You can get cash back from 500 plus retailers across the UK.
You will get an accurate assessment of your finances, but you will need to pay a monthly subscription to access all benefits.
- Money Dashboard
It is a free app that helps you track how much you are left with until your payday and grow this amount. The aim of this app is to boost savings solely. This award-winning app supports 50-plus accounts.
- You can split transactions that help you organise them the way you want.
- It allows of transfer within all your accounts as long as they are linked to the app.
- You can access the report of monthly spending. Reviewing it will help you decide where you need to cut back on.
- You will receive warnings when your balance is low, and bills are still outstanding.
You can operate this app on a desktop as well.
- Curve
Have you ever wondered to rule your money using one single card regardless of multiple banks? Curve app can help you do so. It will consolidate all your bank accounts into one single card and track spending. This helps remove the hassle of juggling between multiple accounts.
- Choose the plan that best suits your finances and then get a Curve card.
- You can categorise spending so you know where your money is going out.
- You can move transactions from one account to another.
The best part of this app is that you will use one debit card for all of your accounts. However, this comes with an expensive subscription. If you are looking for an app exclusively available for the budgeting feature, this app might not be an ideal one for you.
Can a budgeting app help with debt management?
Budgeting is important if you want to stay on top of your money. Whether or not you use a budgeting app, you cannot be in the saddle without monitoring your expenses. When you use a budgeting app, you can clearly see how much money is going toward debts like short term loans with no guarantor, payday loans, mortgages, auto loans, etc.
You will have a clear idea of how much money you have left that needs to be utilised for other expenses like rent, food, travel and savings. With the help of budgeting apps, you will be able to take stock of each penny you spend.
Using budgeting apps does not mean that you will experience something miraculous overnight. They can tell you where you currently stand, but they cannot take the necessary steps on your behalf. After seeing a true picture of your finances, you will need to think about what should be done.
Even if you manage to build some savings, it should not imply that you will never need to borrow money. It will make it a bit more sensible. However, experts suggest doing research before taking out any loan, like loans for bad credit in the UK from a direct lender.
Summing up
There are several budgeting apps that you can use in the UK with the aim of getting control over your finances. However, it does not mean that you do not need to put in effort to improve your financial condition.
