Working on your personal finances and managing money is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family. Yet, while many of the concepts are not too challenging, your time and knowledge can be limited.
After all, not everyone can dedicate hours to learn and not everyone loves spreadsheets either.
Luckily, the digital advancements have provided the world with numerous personal finance software and apps to help you master your finances.
Now you’ll crush the money basics, become more efficient at financial planning, and will start to discover ways to meet your financial goals.
What I like about using personal finance software is the ease and organization of everything you need. You get all the data in nice clean formats, plus they auto-pull info for you during your busy life.
What Is Personal Finance Software?
Personal finance software are programs developed to help the everyday person improve their financial planning, investments, budgeting, and easily monitor and assess all their finances in one place. These platforms can make finances easier to organize, more visual, and help you learn as well.
Choosing the best personal finance software
With any decision with money, choosing which financial software or personal finance apps to go with depends on your current needs.
Some personal finance software helps you with budgeting and expense tracking, while others may focus on net worth, spending, or your investment account.
Ideally, you’ll want to write down your goals, what you need help with, and what will interest you the most when it comes to your finances.
By knowing these things, you’ll be able to determine which personal finance software might be the perfect option for you.
Additionally, while these companies understandably want to make a profit, you might be budget conscious about the tools you use as well. Many are affordable and worth paying for, but it’s nice to use for free first.
Below I put together a list of the best free personal finance software options. And, I also added the best personal finance platforms that offer free trials — that way you can test out some out first before considering paying for them. Let’s dive in!
Free Personal Finance Software
The fintech world is full of similar budgeting apps and financial planning software.
Ideally the one or ones you choose will come down to the design, support, and if the product features have everything you specifically need.
Let’s get into some of the free personal finance software options that help you manage your money efficiently.
1. Trim
Negotiating bills and figuring out unused subscriptions can be a pain. And even though you want to save money, the hassle of this process can be frustrating.
This is where Trim aims to solve that problem for you. Here’s how it works:
- Trim analyzes your spending patterns to figure out the best ways that you can take action and help you save you money.
- Then Trim negotiates cable, internet, phone, and medical bills, cancels old subscriptions, and more — for you.
Additionally, Trim offers a savings account. You’ll get 4% annualized bonus on your first $2,000 and 1.1% after that. Plus, all funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000.
Trim is free to use for the following services: personal finance dashboard, personalized spend alerts and reminders, detection and fighting of overdraft fees, finding and cancelling old subscriptions, and more.
They also have a paid tier for their Bill Negotiation, Debt Payoff, and Trim Simple Savings options.
Learn More About Trim and Sign-Up For Free Here
2. Albert
Albert is one option I’m seeing more of and is also free to use. It’s a financial monitoring app (like Mint or Personal Capital. More below on them).
You link up all of your accounts and it can then track your net worth, your account balances, and monitors your balances, bills and spending.
They also offer something they call Albert Savings, which is their automatic savings feature.
- No fees
- Free withdrawals
- Up to 1% annual cash bonuses, just for saving
Albert analyzes your income and spending throughout the week, finding extra dollars to save automatically.
The other option they offer is called Albert Genius, which combines human financial advisor insights along with the app insights to provide advice via text.
Learn More About Albert and Sign-Up Here
3. Clarity Money
Another popular software tool to see your finances all in one place is Clarity Money. This is backed by Marcus by Goldman Sachs, which allows this app to be completely free to use.
You can open a high-yield savings account directly in the app and connects the account.
But this tool helps you track your spending and expenses, helps track and cancel subscriptions, transfer money to different accounts within the app, and more.
This of course is then organized into nice data tables and graphs to help you easily visualize your personal finances.
However, the tool is missing some other components that many other apps on this list offer. But it might be worth giving it a shot to test for yourself.
Learn More About Clarity Money and Sign-Up Here
4. Personal Capital
Personal Capital is a free wealth management tool that gives you a complete overview of your money. The platform helps you track financial areas like your investments, cash flow, budget, and net worth in one location.
You can login via their desktop platform or use the Personal Capital app for on-the-go discovery and financial monitoring. And those features are completely free to use.
If you have a portfolio of more than $100,000, you can opt for their personalized financial advice based on your goals. This is a paid feature, so there will be a fee for this service but not something you have to ever use, but worth noting.
Sign-up For Personal Capital For Free Here
5. Blooom
Looking to optimize your 401k, find hidden fees, and more? Then Blooom is a great free tool for you to use.
Blooom is an robo-advisor that analyzes your existing 401k and then optimizes it for you. It will automatically manage your retirement accounts for you based on your specific goals.
Besides supporting your company 401k, Blooom also can analyze and monitor the health of your 403b, 401a, 457 or TSP accounts. Just recently, they added IRA’s to the list!
The company also has a paid version that does a whole lot more (read the review here), but the free version can offer you plenty.
Sign-up For Blooom For Free Here
6. Credit Karma
You probably are well aware of Credit Karma by now, but if not here is a little synopsis.
Credit Karma is a free platform that allows you to see your credit reports, credit scores, and get recommendations about your credit history.
Logging in does not impact your scores at all and give you a picture of what’s going on in your personal credit history. Additionally, Credit Karma now offers a high-yield savings account on top of it.
I use Credit Karma often and it has helped me prevent some identity theft damage as well. You get real-time alerts and resources to help you maintain a good credit score.
There are tons of features, so I recommend checking out the site a bit further.
Learn More About Credit Karma and Sign-Up Here
7. Mint
Mint is definitely one of the most popular budgeting and expense tracking tools out there.
When you set up your account, you can have the Mint pull in any bank and credit card information. This will help you analyze your spending and current big picture of your money.
Mint allows you to set up alerts for various things like if your balances are getting low or any upcoming bills to help keep you on track. And if you create any budget categories, Mint will give you real-time information.
Besides that, Mint also includes investment tracking for your retirement accounts and help catch hidden fees.
It doesn’t do all the investment work for you, but seeing everything in one place with date is very useful. Mint is completely free to use on iOS and Android devices, as well as desktop.
Learn More About Mint and Sign-Up Here
8. Pocketsmith
I only recently came across PocketSmith, but reading through the reviews and their website I became pretty impressed. This personal finance software allows you to connect all your accounts in one place.
But what makes this application different, is the ability to forecast where your accounts may go based certain outcome from your finances.
You can connect to bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, and loans to your PocketSmith account.
Some cool features include live banking feeds, multi-currency tracking support, budgeting and keeping tabs of expenses, organize transactions, net worth, projected balances based on your financial habits, and much more.
The free version is quite basic, but will give you a sense if PocketSmith is right for you. But if you want a lot of amazing features, you will have to upgrade to either their paid Premium or Super offerings.
Learn More About PocketSmith and Sign-Up Here
Personal Finance Software With Free Trials
The previous section focused on tools that are free to use. Most do have paid versions as well that get you more features, but you don’t need to ever sign-up if you do not need.
Along with the personal finance software that have free options, there are some others that are paid only that are also really good.
But to maximize your results and test these budgeting tools or finance apps, I wanted to share the ones that offered you free trials first.
Just remember if you do sign-up, ensure you can cancel at the end if you have no desire to pay for it.
However, if you find them helpful with managing personal finances, then I would consider paying for them. Each platform is quite affordable and can make a huge difference in your life.
9. Tiller
Spreadsheets are a popular form of money management, but sometimes can be a pain to organize. That’s where Tiller makes it easier for you.
Tiller links to your checking, credit card, loan, investment and other accounts and can pull from 20,000+ financial sources into a Google Sheet.
Here is where you can then perform your own calculations on the data and even download it into Excel. Or let Tiller handle it and have it auto-update templates that they have to organize your data.
Additionally, it’ll also send you daily emails with a summary of your recent transactions and balances.
The service costs $59 per year or $4.92 per month, but you can use the 30-day free trial first to see if it makes sense for your needs.
Start Your Free Trial of Tiller Here
10. You Need A Budget
Probably one of the most popular budgeting software out there is You Need A Budget (YNAB).
The goal of this software is to help you improve your financial literacy and master your own monthly budget.
Here’s how YNAB works.
The software provides you with tutorials that will help you tackle some of the tougher financial topics with your finances and budget.
It also automatically links to your bank account, integrating your spending information for analysis and budgeting tracking.
Now you can keep tabs on how well you are doing on your monthly budget and can take action if you’re overspending.
YNAB offers a 34-day free trial that allows you to use the software. The full software is $11.99 per month or $84 annual if you pay upfront, which saves you some money.
11. Mvelopes
Mvelopes is a personal finance software that uses “digital envelopes” to manage your budget and current cash flow.
The platform works in a few steps where you choose the financial goals that are most important to you, then add your bank accounts and set your income.
Mvelopes helps gain control over finances and help you recover income from hidden spending. Gives you insights into all of your accounts and transactions and helps to eliminate existing debt and increasing savings.
They have a 30 day free trial and three paid tiers with different features pending your needs.
Is Personal Finance Software Safe?
Any personal finance software or money app will be safe as most will use strong encryption and controls to ensure your financial data is protected. Always review any of products’ security features before signing up, as you want to protect yourself from fraud or hacking.
Have you used any personal finance software or apps? Have you used any of the above ones that I listed before? Which ones have you used and enjoyed that are not listed? Let me know in the comments below.