If you’re on the hunt for the best free budget app, then Mint is worth a moment of your time. It could easily be named one of the best budgeting apps 2019 because it’s very popular, and for good reason.
First, there’s the free component. Although You Need a Budget is fantastic, some people can’t come to terms with spending money to save money. Here’s where Mint comes in. It doesn’t offer the manual entry option (which, still, we highly recommend), but it does just about everything else under the sun.
You’ll start out by syncing all your bank accounts, including credit cards and loans. Then, you categorize everything. You list all your bills, but you also categorize your transactions. So, when you run to Walmart, that gets posted to the right spending category. But, what’s really cool is that you can take a deeper dive and see where you could be doing better.
For example, at Walmart, you probably buy certain items that might be categorized under groceries, other items that might be categorized under electronics, and other items that might be categorized under medicine.
Mint allows you to split up your transactions and get down to the nitty-gritty. This allows you to take note of the fact that you’re doing alright on your grocery bottom line, but you need to ease up on your frivolous spending in the electronics category.
The other thing we love about Mint is their visuals. It displays pie charts and graphs, detailing your patterns. This will either be scary or promising. It’ll be scary if you’re blowing through your grocery budget with wild abandon. It’ll be encouraging if you start noticing an uptick in that “savings” category.
Beware: Mint is going to expose a lot of the not-so-good areas of your spending habits. But, isn’t that what we’re here to do anyway?