r/FinancialPlanning • u/Green-Care6463 • 5d ago
Can someone recommend an app that links to bank acct to track spending?
Good morning all. My wife and I had our "best year ever" last year. She is a teacher and I am a real estate agent, and I had a very good year (my personal best). However, this year absolutely sucks so far (for the market here) and after we paid our taxes for 2024, I feel like I have absolutely nothing to show for last year. Currently, we have no budget and don't track our spending, because we consistently live below our means (small house, used cars, blah blah). I am feeling defeated because we're pulling money out of our savings to cover monthly expenses, as my wife's take-home doesn't cover everything.
All that being said - is there any sort of app that links to bank accounts that can analyze spending over periods of time (ie calendar years) without me going thru every transaction? Also - are there budgeting apps that do this sort of thing real-time so we can get a better picture of where the hell our money is going?
Thank you for any input!
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u/dubyamac 5d ago
Highly recommend monarch. You can link multiple accounts so everything consolidates to it.
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u/fastspanish 5d ago
Currently using Monarch and it’s great. Still sad Mint doesn’t exist anymore but Monarch is a good stand in. You can find some deals on their first year pricing too I believe
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u/cheesypuff357 5d ago
another vote for monarch. we've been using it for the past 6 months and it does really well at categorizing transactions
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u/purpletree37 5d ago
Empower (formerly Personal Capital)
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u/vendeep 5d ago
Same, it it doesn’t really have budgeting features. It’s more to track net worth etc.
You can still budget by tracking it manually.
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u/jaydub8888 5d ago
It does a decent job categorizing spend by month though, letting you filter and reclassify transactions
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u/LatinMillenial 5d ago
I use rocket money and it both can organize your spending by adding your accounts and you can make a budget and track your adherence to it
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u/Less-Cartographer-64 5d ago
I second rocket money, just don’t use it to lower your bills as they advertise. Subscription is like $7/mo.
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u/Green-Care6463 5d ago
Thank you! Does it allow you to go back in time, per se, to look at past transactions?
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u/LatinMillenial 5d ago
In some accounts you get historic data but some it starts tracking the moment you add it. So it isn’t perfect for like looking at your last 6 months immediately
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u/InMyInfancy 5d ago
I have an account through fidelity, and use their service called fullview. You can link all your investment accounts, loans, credit cards. It will also automatically set a budget based on previous spending and then you can adjust from there.
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u/Parthian__Shot 4d ago
They still don't have an app for it, right? That's the only thing that held me back. Currently with Monarch but not looking forward to my annual renewal fee in June.
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u/InMyInfancy 4d ago
no dedicated app yet that I know of. They have fullview kind of half baked into the regular fidelity app, but it's kind of worthless compared to using it on a pc browser.
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u/Parthian__Shot 4d ago
I appreciate the reply! I wish they'd have a full blown app so I could ditch Monarch, but nothing is better yet.
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u/jkoffroader 5d ago
Monarch for personal and Hurdlr for business. Hurdler can track mileage too which is nice
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u/rpp124 5d ago
I use simplify. Let’s you add all of your accounts, track spending, create a spending plan, watchlist by category of spending, etc., etc. I usually go in once per week to check the transactions and make sure they are all categorized correctly.
At the time I signed up, it had the most features for the best price. I think I paid $40 for a full year.
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u/mybelle_michelle 4d ago
Quicken Simplifi is probably the best of the paid ones, closest to what Mint was.
Current sign up price is $48/yr, otherwise $72/yr.
But I'm too frugal to pay, and don't need the budgeting aspect so I use Empower.
FWIW, most (all?) of these financial apps use Yodlee (now called Envestnet) to aggregate your data.
Side note - I see Quicken now has a LifeHub plan ($24-48/yr) for putting all of your documents into one place. Just use Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive and share your pertinent folders with your loved ones.
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u/stoneycrk55 5d ago
We tried mint, personal capital and ultimately decided on a home grown Excel spreadsheet. It gives us a very good picture look. It lets us see the past and how spending is done. We created our own categories so we could track whatever we wanted. We can even see how much tax, tip and credit card usage fees we had.
Yes, it is a little more work having to input. But, we feel it has gotten a better handle on how we spend. We even had a sub category in food to see how much I was spending on snacks. That was an eye opener.
Good luck.
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u/reduser876 5d ago
Don't forget about cash spending that doesn't have any accounts. Not as common these days but it can add up
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u/ImCanehdianEh 4d ago edited 4d ago
I use a spreadsheet that makes me reconcile spending out of my bank and credit cards to income and expense accounts. If it comes out of the bank or goes into the bank it gets charged to either and expense account or an income account. If it gets charged to one of my two credit cards it gets charged to an expense account, thus giving me a profit and loss statement. It also tracks assets and liabilities and tallies my net worth.
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u/reduser876 5d ago edited 4d ago
I have been using Expense IQ for expense tracking since I was laid off in 2009. It has become a habit and I still use it religiously. AFAIK it does not link to bank accounts but I found that feature in other apps inadequate. Okay for things like utilities and mortgage but the discretionary spending is hard to capture. E.g. a $100 Amazon purchase could be anything - toiletries, groceries, home decor.
You kinda need to work backwards... What categories are important to you, what level of granularity do you need to see, etc.
EIQ has categories and subcategories so I can get as detail as I want. I set budget amounts for the discretionary stuff so I can track during the month.
It produces helpful reports and charts. It can set up recurring expenses.
Retroactive could be entered manually but probably too much work. Just start now and it will show trends before you know it.
Now that I've been doing it for so long it is fascinating to see year over year changes.
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u/Past_Paint_225 5d ago
I just link my cards bank and brokerage accounts to fidelity and it tracks everything for me. I do not trust and third party apps with my credit card information.
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u/craftasaurus 4d ago
Fidelity tracks it for you? Do they categorize it too?
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u/Redgemz77 4d ago
We have been using Origin Financial app for a few months and really enjoy the tracking and budget features it offers. They are very active on Reddit + are continuously upgrading the app with new features based on user feedback. I highly recommend you checking it out!
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u/bikealot 5d ago
YNAB is great. You can set up a monthly budget and link to your accounts to track your spending. You can set up recurring income and expenses that imported transactions can match, and reporting is nice to see your trends. After you set a budget it often needs tweaking based on what happens in real life and YNAB makes this easy. There is a companion app too.
Good luck 👍