Have you started the New Year with good intentions around your finances? Do you wish to reduce your debt and start a savings habit? With a little help each us can make small changes to our finances by budgeting helping us to keep on track.
There are lots of mobile apps that can help you with this. Here we have focused on our top 5 that are more suited to Irish consumers. The good news is most of them are free with addons extra.
- Spendee is an app that is free to download and helps you manage your expenses,
setting targeted spending goals and splitting spending targets into categories. The great thing is that this app supports connections to Irish banks, means it will automatically take in all your incomings and outgoings in your bank account. It includes all features mentioned above, as well as ‘shared wallets’ feature that can be shared with a user’s family members, and a utility bill tracker so you know when bills are due. It operates on a tiered pricing system, with the basic being free, and can be upgraded for a monthly fee.
- HomeBudget is another free integrated expense tracker designed to help you track
your expenses, income, bills due and account balances. It offers budgeting support and analysis of your income & expenses, including charts and graphs. A lite version of HomeBudget is free, or you can upgrade for a monthly fee. More advanced setting allow you access to Family Sync, where a group of devices within the household can exchange income and expense information within a single budget.
- Plum is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) savings system that launched in Ireland in
November 2020. It is free of charge to download and works by linking up with the user’s bank account, supporting most major Irish banks. The AI then calculates a personalised amount to save, which is automatically set aside every week. Users can customise the level of savings they require by choosing from ‘saving moods’ that range from ‘Shy’ to ‘Beast Mode’. The AI can also round up purchases to the nearest euro, saving the change.
You can upgrade from Plum Basic to Plum Pro for €2 a month. This upgrade grants access to a range of more advanced saving and money management features, including saving challenges; pockets; and cashback.
Revolut is another popular free app. It basically is an online bank with zero chargehttps://www.revolut.com/en-IE/meet-your-financial-goals-with-vaults.s. Revolut have a Vaults feature which is particularly useful as it rounds up every purchase made using your card to the near unit of currency and saves the change in a vault. You can also make one off payments into the vault, or set up a regular payment.
Of particular interest for parents – Revolut now offer a Junior Account for children between the ages of 7 to 17. The Revolut Junior account is a useful way of teaching your children how to manage their pocket money, whilst you remain in control of what they spend!
This is a really good one for small businesses and freelancers. The Bullet app is a good way to store and keep track of your receipts – without having to keep those receipts in your wallet. Bullet allows you to photograph receipts and keep them electronically in one place. As well as cutting down on the clutter of paper receipts it is an easy way to record the expenses which you can claim off your tax bill. It is one of the few apps which has the Irish taxation and accounting rules built into simple workflows, automating Irish tax returns. Bullet is free – though there is a charge for optional add-on apps. .
Hopefully our app suggestions help you get on track for 2022, and if you need to take things a step further please reach out – grainne@sunrisefinancialplanning.ie.