Best Budgeting Apps Round Up for 2025!

if you have been looking for a really great budgeting app to start putting your finances together and you're like I don't want to mess with a spreadsheet I don't want to mess with a notebook I just want an app to do it for me then I've rounded up the top best budgeting apps that you need to take a look at for 2025 stick around hey guys welcome back to the channel I'm your host Justine here we talk about all ways to help you Achieve Financial confidence Crush debt the least more fun and fewer payments and I have to tell you when it comes to budgeting apps I kind of have this like back and forth relationship with them because they do so much of the work for you you can get caught in this hands-off approach to your money so if you want the app to really supplement your lifestyle and your financial goals then you really have to be handson with them and so that's why I went through found the best budgeting apps that I felt like still gave you that Hands-On approach without completely taking the work off of your plate because let's be honest you still need to be actively engaged with your money so stick around until the very end where I'm going to share my favorite budgeting app with you but let's go ahead and get started with this list the first one is you need a budget or as their fan base calls them YNAB so you can go to ynab.com to get plugged into this app you can actually start a free trial and when I did this this you can access and try wab for free for 34 days which I think is really awesome actually there is an annual subscription of $99 for the year or $4.99 per month but I want to show you what this looks like on the inside so what's cool about this is you can actually share your wab subscription with your partner or your family so you have one account that everybody has access to if you and your partner are actively budgeting together what I would consider a pro is you don't have to sync your financial accounts like you don't have to log into a financial account to start pulling in transactions you can do this manually if you prefer everything's listed in this line item like style where you see everything kind of categorized in these preset categories so I found that a little Annoying just because I'm like I don't have all of these things but you can go through and edit and delete them if they don't make sense for your budget and the way that they've got this listed out is you've got your bills you've got your needs and wants so that's how they delineate things inside of their app needs wants bills and then you can kind of add things that may pertain to you now the first time that I went in and started setting up my budget inside of yab it didn't automatically pull in and import transactions from my financial accounts which was kind of annoying because I really wanted to have them go ahead and automatically categorize things so if you are going through this and you want to assign cash what you do is you will put whatever the amount is inside of your checking account and then you'll start adding money to be assigned so electricity let's say it's $150 that needs to be assigned and then it's going to list that transaction as it occurs there's a lot of bells and whistles to this and there's a bit of a learning curb with wab but I do feel like it's customizable enough to get you to think about being actively engaged with your money the next one is Monarch money this is a fan favorite among the personal finance Community I feel like you hear a lot about Monarch money what's cool about them is they are very customizable in the sense that I found that it was less bells and was Sly than YNAB and it was a little bit more straightforward to interpret okay and at the time of this recording I'm seeing a 30% off uh your first year subscription with code welcome I will also leave an affiliate link below for you to check out that there's no cost to you I really liked this one actually when I was setting it up for my monthly budget you could actually go in and toggle through your income you could quickly just said hey like I have a $112,000 budget here's what actually came through you can it's also got that very much like line item register of transactions all of them were put together into these little subsections so that was really nice you can also roll over any unused funds from the previous month so if you see this little like Circle arrow thing you can actually roll that over so I thought that was really nice so it's a list style budget right you can set the budget you can see what you've actually spent so far and then what is the remaining amount that you have to work with also it's going to show you the amount that's left to budget so I thought this was really straightforward they actually have a little bit more uh items here that you can take a look at goals Investments reports which looks like it's in beta cash flow transactions accounts has everything for you to kind of toggle through and look you can even skip ahead to start planning out for future months into you know different different scenarios to help you set up you're spending for a particular month like December you're going to spend more money on Christmas holiday stuff versus January you're probably going to maybe do a health cleanse I don't know you're going to be spending money different month to month and so you can actually plan ahead inside of Monarch now it wasn't intuitive on how to set up custom budget categories for that I had to to go into settings and then I had to click on categories and then I had to go in here and actually create new categories or create new groups so it was kind of buried under the settings I wished they would have had that here inside of the actual budget say like how can I add a new category here but otherwise that's how you toggle to that there's also no credit score feature that I saw if that's important to you then you'll probably want to take a look at that uh just to see okay like what is my credit score how is my budget impacting my credit score that could be something to look out for maybe Monarch is not the right platform for you but I think the biggest draw here is that you can easily just create rules you can create transfer categories it's just simple and straightforward and again the the I'm showing you the web desktop version this looks really great in the mobile app as well the next one to check out is rocket money rocket money is a budgeting app that not only helps you budget your spending but it can also uh negotiate and lower your bills on your behalf it can also locate find and cancel your subscriptions if you are taking advantage of the app's premium features so if you want to go premium then the way that rocket money's pricing structure works is it's on a sliding scale so you get to pick how much you want to pay for the app and I think the range is between $6 and $12 it actually defaults to $10 a month well that's kind of steep compared to wab and and Monarch money cuz now you're paying $120 for the year versus 100 bucks I guess so $20 difference is that steep I mean you tell me but the cool thing about it is it it actually does some of that dirty work for you so inside of the budgeting app very similar to Monarch in the sense that it has your budgeted amount your actual what you actually spent and what is the remainder inside of that particular budget cool thing is is you can add a budget for particular stuff so we can do some of the recommended such as Auto and transport I'm going to do Christmas that sounds good add Christmas we're going to budget $350 here and then we can actually go in and start seeing some of our transactions so you get this nice little list of all of the transactions here you can see the categories if it doesn't belong in a particular category maybe you did the Amazon purchase and it was actually for Christmas then you can quickly change that go back over to budgets and then that should have been reflected and it is and then you can quickly see exactly how much is remaining inside of that particular budget you can also check your credit score here uh you can activate a free credit report it does say coming soon to web so it's probably accessible um inside of the app in fact rocket money really focused on making sure the mobile app version of their budget was all put together very seamlessly before transitioning into web they used to not have the web application so the fact that they have the web application I think is a great Pro because a lot of the times when I'm budgeting I like to have a big screen this so Millennial of me I like to have my big laptop screen see everything open up multiple windows instead of doing everything teeny tiny but you do you uh it is a mobile app for a reason and where it shines is being able to locate and cancel those subscriptions and negotiate your bills I mean could you imagine getting a lower bill for T-Mobile I mean no but yes that would be awesome rocket money's premium features can do that for you I am an affiliate for them so I will leave my link below for you to check out rocket money this one is definitely one to take note of for 2025 and one thing to know about rocket money before I'm like they were awesome there was one thing that I was like eh you had to link your checking account for the app in order to like check out and get started and start using the app which was kind of annoying it's like okay I get it it gets the the user in more there's more buyin when you get your financial accounts linked up but I just wanted to get in and start playing with it I wish they had like a Sandbox version of this so I could start playing with it and see if it's a tool that works best for me before like going through all the rig rules of opening up my financial account adding in my username and password connecting it so that was my biggest con about rocket money is just the onboarding process was a bit time consuming but overall love how it differentiates itself against other budgeting apps this next one if you've been following the channel for a long time then you know I've talked about this one quite often I feel like I've mentioned it quite often but it is quick and simplify so quick and simplify Quicken has had its own software for eons decades but never had they ever had a budgeting app until recently and what I love about simplify is that they are continuously reworking their app to make it more efficient and effective for a variety of budgeting scenarios right now they are having a sale on their app so get in while you can I think this is a fantastic I think normally they charge something like I I think it can be build up to $80 annually which is still like the cheapest one out of this list right now they're showing it $2 a month which I mean sure $24 in the year I think I've also seen uh promos for $48 for the year which is still such a huge Advantage a cost Advantage compared to the other ones I want to show you what this looks like in inside because this looks so much different than Monarch than wab than rocket money because everything was kind of in that list style this one actually is more like blocks so you've got these blocked out let me show you for Planned spending so you can either do a list view or you can do these tile views so as you are looking at things this is kind of the learning C with simplify so this does take some figuring out some onboarding but I have tutorials on my channel if you want to check this out for real for real but you can also put list out your income you're going to list out your bills so here you're going to have your rent your daycare your internet if something is not a bill like AMC is entertainment then you would just click these three little dots and then you would just delete this and then it automatically updates here but where you're going to be doing the bulk of your budget in is under planned spending so you're going to have grocery shopping maybe we want to do a monthly expense for restaurants so let's do that restaurants and then we can set the monthly amount of let's call it $400 also you do have the option of rolling over the balance each month so that any unused dollars can actually be moved over to the next month and you can create you can also plan ahead by using the Arrow buttons up at the top to say okay how do I want January's budget to look different than December's maybe December I want to do a onetime expense of gifts I'm going to name this Christmas I'm going to put $500 and now that's been added here and then and then anytime it pulls the transactions from your financial institutions you're going to see that and then you can go ahead and categorize as such I feel like there's a lot of customization to simplify that works really really well and then you can see exactly how much money is left over as you are adding things in so you got your income doing all these different checks if you're like no this is incorrect I need to update this to $3,000 cuz I know I'm getting an extra pay increase for this month you can you can set these up and Link them to transactions which is really cool so you could also split transactions so at this restaurant if I was is maybe splitting it with somebody else you could go here and split and then say Okay $8 here and then you can add left to split so now you've got 50/50 going through these different transactions which I find is really really helpful especially have you ever gone to Target and you bought groceries you also bought clothes you also bought gifts and you're like uh that all doesn't belong in shopping maybe I do want to break out the $15 I spent for groceries you can do that by using the split transactions feature you can also track your savings goals inside of simplify so if you were wanting to save for like a new car you can set a goal amount of I don't know $20,000 you can say whether or not you've actually saved anything so far then you can set a Target goal date of when you want to achieve this goal maybe it's I don't know 3 years from now then you can see how it's going to change your monthly contribution we need to be saving about $400 per month and then we can create the goal and you can actually include that plan contribution inside of your spending plan which I really like so if we were go to go back to the spending plan savings goal here it is and then we would make sure that we are actually transferring that money over into our savings account and by the way what's going to be new coming out for simplify is you can actually transfer money from account to account which I think is fantastic inside of the app in addition you can also create watch lists for particular spending categories so if you know you have a fetish for Starbucks you can search for let's do this coffee coffee shops there we go call it Starbucks don't don't set we just want to watch this guy every single time we go to Starbucks this is going to be included here as a spending watch list now I'm just showing you inside of a dummy account just for the sake of there's actual real paycheck names and amounts from my my personal budget and so I like to keep that hidden but this is dummy account it's going to pull in as much information as possible from your own Financial accounts which I think is really great if you are a seasoned budgeter and you use syncing funds in which you are planning those monthly contributions and setting them aside you can use things like in your planed spending rolling over the amount or you can set up that syncing fund as a savings goal but it's a little bit trickier to do versus like doing a Google sheet or some sort of spreadsheet where you're manually tracking that so that would be kind of my biggest con with simplify is the ability to actually track sinking funds but there are workarounds for that if you are using syncing funds inside of your budget of course with any of these budgeting apps transactions are not categorized correctly every single time so there is a bit of manual work but again that's why you are going in and actively managing your money inside of these apps just because you have an app doesn't mean that you have to take this hands-off approach to your money now I promised you that I would tell you what my favorite budgeting app of this Roundup is and it is quick and simplify just because I know how many features that they have included over the past year and what they are still continuing to add to the functionality of their budgeting app I mean you can track your net worth you can track your credit score I just love the watch list I think that's great rocket money also does a fantastic job because of the subscriptions and the bill negotiation that is so unique to them so I feel like regardless of what you choose you cannot go wrong with any of these four if you want to do a budgeting app so I'd love to know in the comments which one is your favorite which one are you testing out or are currently using and let us know your thoughts on it using the comments everything will be linked Below in the description box for you happy budgeting in 2025 and I will catch you in the next one [Music]