As technology has evolved, personal finance has evolved with it. Below, we discuss 13 free smart phone and tablet applications which will help you manage your money, save more and earn extra income. All of the apps are free to download and use, and all should make your life easier and your bank balance bigger!
Free Apps to Help You Manage Money
Banking Apps: Our first app to manage your money may be an obvious one, but people often overlook the efficiency of these apps. Your bank or building society will have an iOS or Android app which will allow you to access your account information and make simple transfers. This will allow you to quickly and easily check your balance or determine whether a certain payment has been made to, or has left, your account.
Paym: Paym is a new and innovative service which allows you to transfer money to your friends and family just by using their mobile number. This means that you will never have to ask anyone who is also registered with paym for their account number or sort code again. This clearly provides additional security benefits (shouting your bank details out to another person in public, or even via email/text isn’t the best thing to be doing!) and is a great time saver.
Toshl Finance: Budgeting is an absolutely essential part of managing your money. We discuss how to make a budget on moneystepper, but Toshl provides an interesting new way through an app. Through their aim of “making finance fun”, the Toshl app provides a number of interesting graphics to visually represent where you money is going and how to make your paycheck last longer. Toshl can also remind you when you need to pay a bill or help you with currency conversions.
Stocks: If you have a portfolio of investments, we personally recommend that you don’t spend much time selecting individual stocks – see our post on why passive investing beats active investing. However, if you insist on doing so (or you simply want to check out the performance of your market tracking ETFs, then using the stocks app (which is already built into the device as standard) will be the most efficient way of not wasting too much time!
Free Apps to Help You Save Money
Vouchercloud: This is an excellent app when you are out and about. Simply turn on your location services on your mobile device and the Vouchercloud app will show you nearby cafes, bars, restaurants and other places of interest which have money off vouchers. Turning on mine right now tells me that I can get £10 off 2 main courses at the Café Rouge at the end of my street! Click “use now” and voilà – you now have a voucher code which you can use in the restaurant immediately.
WhatsApp / Facetime / Skype: An oldie, but still a goodie. Free messaging, chat and video chat services are now readily and their quality is rather remarkable. Use these apps to make your phone calls to friends and family and you’ll be surprised how many less minutes of calls and number of messages you’ll use on your mobile phone or landline. Alter your contract accordingly with your telephone provider and you could save yourself a packet!
mySupermarket: One of my favourite apps at the minute. With supermarkets currently in the midst of a price war, you can certainly find that you’ll save money by shopping around. Well, now you can shop around in your living room in your pants! Just download the mySupermarket app, put your weekly shop in the basket and the app will compare the price to all other supermarkets and work out which one is the cheapest for your shop. You can even order online from the app and earn extra cashback by doing so. Very clever stuff!
Savings Goal Free: A very, VERY simple app, but a fun one nonetheless. Simply set your savings target for a specific event or goal, and then each time you save towards that goal put a little more in your virtual pot. Whilst this won’t bank your cash or anything like that, the Blue Peter like savings bar might encourage you to save more and keeping track of your savings towards a specific goal becomes a lot more manageable.
Free Apps to Help You Earn Money
UK Salary Calculator: This app is very useful for anyone who is self-employed or anyone who wants to see what impact a potential promotion or payrise may have on their take home pay. Just enter your gross salary figures (set it to hourly, daily, weekly, etc), your hours worked per week, your age (impacts your national insurance if you are over 65), your pension contributions, etc. This will then spit out your take home pay, which you can use for future budgets (maybe through the aforementioned Toshl finance app). To work out the impact of your payrise, there is also a cool feature where you can put in your old and new salaries and it will work out the change in your take home pay. It might help you decide whether that new job is worth changing for!
Swagbucks: If you want a full understanding of how swagbucks works and how it can earn you money, check out our how to earn money using Swagbucks article. For the purposes of today, all you need to know if that there is an app to help you earn money on the go…
Quidco: …and the same applies to Quidco. Follow this link for a very detailed article on why Quidco is so awesome (including directional instructions and even a video). But, once again, there is a Quidco app which helps you take Quidco on the road!!
Qmee: Do you search using google or another search engine? Of course you do – everyone does. However, Qmee can mean that you get paid to do so! All you have to do is install the extension onto your web browser or via the app. Everytime that you search, a list of results “sponsored by Qmee” are shown. These results will usually be very similar to those found in the google search, but because you click through Qmee, the end website pays Qmee a fee to be shown in these results, and Qmee passes a proportion of this fee (usually between 7p and 15p) onto yourself. Therefore, you can end up getting paid just for your usual search results!
Easybooks: Finally, for anyone wanting to earn more money, you will need to keep track of it. Many people will do this in Excel, but as your side business becomes bigger, you may want to transfer to a more bespoke bookkeeping software. Whilst there are some packages out there for small businesses (such as SAGE), Easybooks effectively does the same thing for free. You can buy add-ons for invoicing and other such things, but just to enter your information and create reports and financial statements is completely free.
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Jayson @ Monster Piggy Bank says
I am using Toshl Finance. Do you know what it gives me? Peace of mind about my finances. I have become less worried since I got the app. It let me know my financial status and budget specifically. I’d like to try out the others like the Paym, I’ve heard lots of good review about it.
moneystepper says
Yeah, I’m a big fan of Toshl. Being able to record your expenses on the move so quickly really helps in the budgeting process. And the graphics are pretty cool as well!! 🙂
SB @ One Cent at a Time says
I use whatsapp extensively and Skype on computer. Using whatsapp we save tons of money on text plans which adds up to $60 per year with international texts extra.
moneystepper says
Whatsapp has been great for the industry as a whole. All phone providers in the UK offer unlimited texts as part of their monthly contracts now because they basically have to in order for anyone to use them…
Paul @ The Frugal Toad says
I have been using Mint for many years now and can’t imagine not having it on my iPhone. It helps me to keep on top of my finances and gives me a real-time snapshot of my budget, no excuses for going over the budget when you use an app like Mint!
moneystepper says
By all accounts, Mint is a great app for tracking your finances and I really like everything those guys are doing in the online community. However, they still don’t have (to my knowledge) a UK option (only US and Canada), which is a real shame!
David Carlson says
I’ve heard of Qmee but not many of the other ones. This is a great list, thanks for sharing!
moneystepper says
I’ve only started using Qmee fairly recently and personally love it. No extra work and money straight to my bank. What is there not to love? 🙂
Connie @ Savvy With Saving says
I use Mint on my iPhone and have become rather addicted to checking it. In fact, I spend so much time on it that I might be doing myself more harm than good but I love it. Toshl Finance sounds interesting though, thanks for the recommendation!
moneystepper says
No problem. I’m not sure how much more Toshl offers over Mint, but its available for users in the UK which Mint currently isn’t!
Deacon says
The Skype app is one that I am surprised at how much I use. For work, I coordinate with programmers in Bangladesh and India for FREE. It is unbelievable how much we can do now in the 21st century with apps like these.
moneystepper says
Thanks for your comment Deacon. It would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago that you could make calls to the other side of the world for free, and you could see the other person’s face whilst doing it! The beauty of technology!
Laurie @wellkeptwallet says
Good info here. If we had smartphones I’d totally take advantage of the savings apps.
moneystepper says
Yeah, these apps are great for saving money, but I’m not sure they are worth buying a smartphone for alone! However, given that the personal finance apps are all free, it does go someway to justify the expense of a smartphone if they can save you £x a month through tracking your finances, earning money from Qmee, etc etc…