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You know why you should have a personal budget. A personal budget can help you track your expenses, achieve your savings goals and avoid spending beyond your means. This article is going to explain why you should use a budgeting app to make that personal budget.
Syncing with Bank Accounts
A lot of the top budgeting apps allow users to sync their budgets with their bank accounts. So, if you use a budgeting app instead of filling out a budget on a simple spreadsheet, you can connect the app to your checking accounts and savings accounts.
Why is this helpful? Being synced to your bank accounts means that the app will give you real-time updates on your spending. You can see how much is coming out of your checking account every month and how it correlates with the guidelines that you set with your budget. These real-time updates could reveal that your spending goes well beyond those guidelines. You’ll want to see this problem as soon as possible.
If you don’t have these updates through a budgeting app, you might not even realize you are overspending until you make a serious mistake like overdrawing your checking account or bouncing a check.
Syncing with Credit Accounts
Plenty of budgeting apps don’t just sync with your checking and savings accounts. They can sync with your credit accounts too, including your credit cards, lines of credit and loans. Doing this will help you keep track of your repayment goals every single month so that you don’t collect late penalties or default on payments.
Say that you don’t have enough personal savings to cover an urgent expense. As a solution, you applied for an online loan to help you recover from the emergency as soon as possible. You paid off the expense and then started a loan repayment plan. One of the best tips for managing your loan payment is to adjust your budget and include recurring loan repayments as a new category. Do this in a way that doesn’t have a negative impact on your other budgetary essentials, like rent, groceries, and utility bills.
Since your budgeting app can sync with loan accounts, you can have an easier time tracking your recurring loan payments through the billing cycle. You’ll be confident that you’re making those repayments on time. And you can track your progress over time, watching as you owe less and less as the months go by.
Sharing Budgeting Goals
Are you part of a couple? Are you living together? Also, Are you sharing most of your expenses? Then, you should build a household budget together with the help of a budgeting app. Not just any budgeting app, though. You will want to choose a budgeting app that’s specifically designed for couples to manage their money together, like HoneyDue.
With an app like this, you can build a budget together, sync joint bank accounts and communicate about shared expenses. You can also choose to keep certain bank accounts private from your partner so that you still have privacy regarding your discretionary spending. This can be extremely useful if you intend to surprise your partner with expenses, like lavish anniversary gifts.
Tracking Your Credit Score
Some budgeting apps allow users to view their credit scores for free. Your credit score is a rating of your creditworthiness and shows lenders whether you are likely to be a high-risk or low-risk borrower. The score will impact your ability to open new credit accounts, whether that is a credit card, line of credit, personal loan, business loan, auto loan or mortgage loan.
If you have a low credit score, you’ll want to do your best to bring it up through steady bill payments and lower credit utilization. You can also bring up your score by maintaining old accounts, minimizing hard credit checks, and correcting errors on your credit report. With the help of your budgeting app, you can track your progress of building up your credit score over time and see how your improvement strategies are going.
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to download one of the top budgeting apps onto your smartphone and start using it.