In college, saving money is one of the hardest things to do. Here are some apps to help you save some money without it being painful. All of the following apps are free to download, so you have no excuse not to utilize them!
Mint
Mint is that personal trainer we all need to kick our butts into shape. When you download Mint and connect it to your bank card it assesses your spending and breaks it up by categories, such as food, shopping, and anything else (After food and shopping does anything else count?). Thanks to the handy dandy graphs Mint shows you daily you will be faced with the ugly truth of your spending, and that just might be enough for you to change your ways for the better. Mint will also come up with a way for you to budget everything you love (weekly Primark trips *cough cough*), and will show you where you can cut costs.
Digit
My personal favorite app, Digit, sends you texts daily with your bank account balance. After assessing your spending Digit will take out some money each week and move it to your digit account. If you want to know your Digit balance simply text Digit, “balance”. If you want to move money out of your Digit account and back into your bank account, you just text it. It’s really simple and I find very painless. You know that Digit is taking out money but usually it’s a few cents a week, not enough to stop you from 3 am Chinese food, but enough that you can start a nice little nest egg for your future self.
Goodbudget
This app is for those of us who are ready to start adulting (yikes!) I know it sounds like a terrible idea, but making a budget for yourself based on your income (be it regular or irregular) will really help you get far in life. With GoodBudget you separate your income into envelopes, like our parents used to do in real life before everything became electronic. With the envelope system each envelope represents an expense, such as phone, rent, electric, or it represents anything else you want to have money for, like shopping, vacation fund, or grocery budget. By splitting it up this way you know exactly how much money you have to do what you want to do, after the money is gone for shopping for the month it’s up to you to have the will power not to spend your grocery money on clothes.
Acorn
With Acorn app whenever you make a purchase Acorn takes the extra change that would round your purchase up to the next dollar and saves it for you. For example, if you spent 5.28 Acorn would then take that extra .72 cents and save it for you. After you’ve got some money saved in your Acorn account you can actually invest your money into stocks, straight from the app! This may be my next app download because it makes it so easy to increase savings straight from the app.
Level Money
This app also helps you budget your money, one things in particular I like about this app is that you can set up an auto save feature so that you can automatically set money aside and you don’t think about it as something you can spend. If you can’t see it, you can’t spend it! This app also tracks your spending in real time so you never have to guess about if transactions are pending or processing.