Why would you download a budgeting app when your phone’s memory is nearing its max? Besides the fact that a budget is one of the best financial tools you can have, an app simplifies this task and provides helpful insights into your finances.
1. Remember Important Due Dates
Do you have a bad habit of forgetting the due dates for your utility bills or personal loans? Forgetting to pay your bills or online loans can deliver a big blow to your finances, even if you don’t make mistakes with money in other ways,.
Missed payments come with a whole host of consequences you want to avoid:
- Late fines
- Added interest
- Credit damage
- Account suspension
Budgeting apps can help you avoid these consequences by notifying you of upcoming payments.
2. Identify Bad Spending Habits
Over time, you can become blind to your spending. A budgeting app becomes a second pair of eyes, tracking all your purchases and organizing them into categories. You can review overburdened categories for bad spending habits that deflate your savings, like having ten overlapping streaming subscriptions.
Cancelling half of your subscription services can free up a lot of money you can use to pay bills on time, pay down online loans, or save for something big.
3. Track Your Financial Goals
Good budgeting apps will do more than track due dates and spending habits. They can also monitor any long-term financial goal you have — whether it’s saving $1,000 for a vacation or building a retirement nest egg.
You can go hyper specific, or you can track your general financial outlook. If you sync all your accounts with the app, it can figure out your overall net worth to show whether you owe or own more.
4. Complete Oversight
Think about all your financial accounts you have under your name — from the basic checking account to the specialized savings accounts, personal loans, and credit cards. Checking on these accounts can be a full-time job, remembering to log in and out of each one.
A budgeting app brings all these accounts under one platform. From the homepage, you can see their status at a glance and understand your financial health in real-time. Streamlining your accounts this way also reduces the chances you forget about an account and let it go delinquent.
5. Automate Your Budget
Perhaps the biggest reason to use an app is how it simplifies your life. Despite how important a budget is for your finances, making and maintaining one winds up being a tedious task. You have to go through your past accounts to figure out how you spend your money and keep a tally of your spending in the future.
It’s all very boring and labor intensive — enough that that many people don’t do it. Instead, they wing it by keeping a vague budget in their heads. Unfortunately, a mental tally isn’t as good as an app, so you can accidentally overspend or overlook mistakes.
A budgeting app is a financial boon to busy people, as it automates all the boring parts of making a budget. You just have to give it permission to access your various accounts; all you have to do is protect your phone so you can access the app. You can even set up automatic alerts when you get close to spending too much on any given expense.
So, make some room on your phone to download a budgeting app. The perks are worth deleting that old Candy Crush you never play anymore.
