Managing your finances on your own in college can be stressful. There’s a lot of planning, tracking, and math. But with modern technology, keeping track of your money doesn’t always have to be difficult. Here are some useful tools to help you with your personal finances.
1. Mint
Mint is a personal budgeting app that connects all of your financial accounts (bank accounts, credit cards, loans, utilities) and keeps track of all your transactions. You can also customize your budget and it will track your spending. In addition, you can create financial goals and it will help you reach them. Currently, I’m trying to save enough for an emergency savings fund.
2. NerdWallet
NerdWallet is a useful financial researching tool. It has reviews of credit cards, banks, bank accounts, and it provides you a weekly credit score free of charge.
3. Digit
Digit gets rid of the stress of saving and saves for you automatically. Digit analyzes how much you can afford to save and takes a bit of money from your checking account and saves it for you. The best part? You don’t even realize the money is missing!
4. Acorns
If you want to start the real path to becoming an adult and learn about investing, you should check out Acorns. Acorns rounds your transactions to the nearest dollar and invests this spare change. They even offer this service free to college students.
5. Debitize
Are you totally afraid of credit cards? I am too! I’m afraid that I’ll get out of hand and purchase things I can’t afford or forget to pay my bill on time. I’ve been using a debit card for as long as I can remember. But credit cards offer some serious perks such as building your credit and some rewards like cash-back bonuses. When you use Debitize, it treats your credit card like a debit card so you’re getting all the perks without spending money you don’t have or forgetting to pay your bill.
6. Venmo
Venmo is a highly convenient app to split purchases with other people. You connect your bank account or credit cards and you can pay any person with a Venmo account. This is a great way to split utility bills, meals, etc.