Mac Best Personal Finance App

Ten years ago, there were no solid personal finance apps out there. If you wanted to track your money, you didn't have many options beyond websites like Google Finance. I got my start tracking our budget and net worth with a spreadsheet. I would learn about Intuit's Quicken software but it felt silly to pay for software to help me save money. It wasn't until later that other personal finance tools started to appear.

The best personal finance software works like a money management app that gives you an instant snapshot of your financial situation in seconds. A lot of the problems we face when dealing with money is how much time it takes to stay on top of things. A good personal finance app will help you save time and money.

Earlier this year I polled the readers of Wallet Hacks for their “must-have, can't live without” money apps. I compiled their responses and made the following list of best personal finance software (most of which have a mobile app).

Best Money Management App – Personal Capital

A financial dashboard is a place where you can see everything involving your money in one place. Your assets, your liabilities, your net worth – all your financial accounts visible on one convenient page.

This is important because when that information is easily accessible, it's easily remembered and understood. We use it to pull in all of our data, though we ignore the credit card debt piece because we pay off our bills every month in full.

Best free personal finance apps While most of the personal finance software cost money, often in the form of a monthly or annual subscription, there are also some programs that offer free trials too. If you're just getting started with budgeting, taking a trial would seem the best option to see if the system on offer works for you.

What's easier – logging into one account or logging into a dozen?

When it comes to a financial dashboard, the clear leader is Personal Capital. It has a rich suite of tools built around investments, with a nod towards expense tracking similar to Mint, so you can get a sense of where everything is at a moment's notice. If you're interested in a consultation with a financial advisor, they have that built-in as well and it's something that helps them stand out from other similar services. It's how Personal Capital makes the money that supports the free tool.

Old mac software archive. This app is for you if: You want an instant snapshot of your finances, from your investments to your budget, in one place. Personal Capital is free.

Best Investing App – Robinhood

Robinhood is a stock brokerage that offers commission free trades through their app or web interface. They're like any other brokerage, they use Apex Clearing Corporation, are a member of FINRA, and have SIPC insurance for up to $500,000 like any other brokerage. There is no account minimum, no maintenance fee, and you can even trade crypto if you're so inclined.

They make money by offering a Robinhood Gold subscription service that gets you margin and after-hours trading. If you want to trade stocks, I find it difficult to argue against a Robinhood and their free trades.

For a limited time, you can get a free share of stock from Robinhood.

Best Budgeting App – You Need a Budget

If you want to change your budget, You Need a Budget (YNAB) is one of the most powerful tools you can use because it does more than track your expenses – it actually helps you build and stick to a budget.

One of the biggest challenges in money management is in near-term planning. What are you going to do next week and next month?

Retirement can be decades away but you are spending money today and tomorrow. By getting the next month right, you go a long way towards getting your money situation under control.

YNAB has a four rule methodology that has worked well for its users.

  1. Give Every Dollar A Job
  2. Embrace Your True Expenses
  3. Roll With The Punches
  4. Age Your Money

Another reason why YNAB is powerful has to do with its educational tools and community. You will not find this with financial tools like Mint. There are no Whiteboard Wednesdays to help you understand your money a little better. This is what separates them from the pack in many ways. Our You Need a Budget review goes deeper into the app and the company if you wish to learn more.

This app is for you if: You want to transform your budget and get your spending in line with your financial goals. YNAB costs $6.99 a month after a 34-day trial.

It's this methodology around the tool that makes it powerful.

Budgeting Runner Up – Mint

For tracking a budget, Mint is one of the most popular free budgeting tools out there and we wanted to list them because they are free to use.

If you don't have sizable investments, Mint is a very powerful tool that is better for budgeting but less effective for investments. I felt like Mint was fantastic up to a point. Once you focus more on investing than budgeting, Personal Capital has far more tools to help you succeed.

I hen looked around (for 2 days while I had a cold) and played with some of the free products for Mac.AndreaMosaic is great (I think you ned to install WINE for it to work properly, but it does and the results are great).MacOSaiX is no longer supported and you have to size your tiles very small before starting. Free photo mosaic app.

This app is for you if: You want to know where your money is going each month without having to log into multiple accounts. Mint is free.

Best Support Tool – Tiller

Magoosh vocabulary app. Tiller is a service that will connect with your bank and credits card to pull daily transaction data into a sheet on Google Docs. No other service out there offers this. You can choose to start from half a dozen templates or roll your own, but Tiller will update it automatically from 100,000+ financial institutions.

Tiller automates your custom spreadsheet so it fits you perfectly. Don't change the way you do things to match a tool, add Tiller and bring your spreadsheet into the 21st century.

Tiller is a monthly subscription but it won't inundate you with advertisements or pitch you on their financial planning services as an upsell. (to be fair, other companies need to do that because they are free – the bills have to be paid!)

You get the customization of a financial spreadsheet but the automation piece so you don't need to login to all of your accounts and update everything manually. Removing that hurdle makes money management that much easier. They offer a free 30-day trial.

This app is for you if: You love spreadsheets or have one you've tailored but need a tool to help you pull the data for you. Tiller costs $6.58 per month ($79/year) after a 30-day trial. (here's more about Tiller)

Best Micro saving App – Acorns

One of the newest innovations in personal finance apps is the idea of a micro-savings app – where you can automatically save small amounts of money and have it invested in the market. The idea is that these apps will figure out how much they can transfer into an investment account without you, or your budget, realizing. It's less active than traditional saving but more effective if you're the type of person who doesn't actively manage your budget daily.

One of the best in class is Acorns, which doesn't rely on a black box “guessing” how much to save. When you make a purchase, the amount is rounded up and transferred. This predictability is often seen as a better process than some other apps, which “guess.” Guessing can be a little scary.

They also have a “Found Money” feature with some partners where if you purchase with a merchant, they may contribute a small bit to your Acorns account.

Here is our full review of Acorns.

Best Personal Finance Assistant – Trim

If robots can help you invest, perhaps they can help you do some of the more mundane jobs you don't want to?

That's the idea behind Trim, and a whole host of similar apps.

Trim is free to use and they can help you renegotiate your bills like with your cable provider, including Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter. They connect to your accounts, analyze your recurring subscriptions, and identifies areas where you could be saving money. The cable is just the start, they will look at other subscriptions too including your car insurance.

The best part is that they handle the negotiations for you. No more calling Comcast and navigating the phone menu for ages – they do it for you. If you want to cancel, they'll do that for you too.

Here is our full review of Trim.

Summary

There are a lot of apps, many of them free but some of them paid, that will help you save time, save money, and save gray hairs.

Want to hear something funny? When we surveyed of our readers, the number one “app” was Microsoft Excel. Far and away the most popular application for anything – budgeting, financial dashboarding, net worth, whatever category you picked – it was Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel is all about finding a template and customizing something that fits your exact needs. It can be a lot of work but that hands-on interaction means you know the data is pristine. You can rely on tools like Tiller to pull the transaction data too so you get the automation (it works with Google Docs).

I use Microsoft Excel to track our net worth, with Personal Capital pulling the data. It's a nice little set up but it takes some time to get going.

The apps on this list are pre-built, faster to get into, and free. If you're starting from scratch, these apps will get you there faster but will not fit you like a glove. Excel is like a custom-tailored suit, these are off the rack.

Other Posts You May Enjoy

Managing finances is very important, but a time taking job which everyone has to do. The main constraint with businessmen and working professionals is time. So, to save their time and manage their finances they can use Personal Finance Management Software.

All these Personal Finance Management Software for Mac are easy to use with simple user interface. These software’s help in preparing your budget, scheduling your bill & debts payments, tracking your investments, preparing monthly and annual reports that help you in comparing your income and spending.

Another important feature of these Personal Finance Management Software for Mac is that you can manage your bank account from your desktop.

Using this Financial Management Software For Mac has many benefits prepares the budget on your behalf, pay online bills, imports data from financial institutions to keep track of your investments and savings and their current market value.

10 Personal Finance Management Software

Personal Finance Apps

1. Moneydance

Moneydance is a leading Personal Finance Management Software through which you can pay your bills online. This is not an end to the features of this great software that has all the features you need like online banking, investments tracking, accounts management, stock holding, and budgeting. With Moneydance, you can prepare your monthly budget and then at the end of the month after tracking all your incomes and investment it will give you a report and suggestions that will help you in tuning up with your budget.

Price: $49.99

2. Money

Money is a powerful and popular Personal Finance Management Software for Mac users. With the help of this software, you can manage all your bank accounts, investments, credit cards, cash, loans and many other works. This software is very easy to use as it has a simple and stylish interface. Moreover, with money, you can create a separate account for cash, bank account, credit card, investments, loans, and assets.

Price: $38.99

3. MoneyWell

MoneyWell is personal finance management software for Mac users. This software helps you in budgeting your finances that help you in increasing your savings and paying off your debts. MoneyWell is based on envelope budgeting system, in which you can assign estimated income then can you check your budget in spite of comparing, it will create your budget on the basis of the income. When you receive your salary fills the amount you received in the MoneyWell and all your expense it will suggest you automatically when you have to stop spending keeping a view of your saving and debts. The interface of this software is easy to use as you can refine your budget. MoneyWell creates reports on your finances that you can share with anyone.

Price: $49.99

4. You Need A Budget

You Need A budget is a great financial software, with which you can manage your finances very well even if you have accounting experience. This will not only help you in managing your current finances it can help you to plan your future spending. This will suggest you keep a fraction of your earning for infrequent and big bills so that at the time of payment of those bills you do not have to face any problem. You Need A budget has a very easy to use interface helps in to manage your finances in a quick and easy way. It works on four simple rules save for future, informed spending decision, simple and flexible management. It is available for Windows users also.

Price: $60 (You can download 34 days free trial

5. iBank

iBank helps you in staying up to date with your bank account balance, savings, investments, bill payment and borrowings. Some of the features of iBank are easy installation, all finances at a place, create instant reports on your finances, synchronize data with your iPad and iPhone, schedule your transactions and track your investments. iBank is regularly updated as the developers of this software are attentive to the needs of the customers. This software shows your data in intelligent and attractive designs.

Price: $9.99

6. iFinance

iFinance is another financial management software that will show your data in an attractive way with the help of three dimensional graph, diagrams and pie charts through which you can easily analyze as well as compare it with other month data. This software can easily fetch all your data from the last financial software you were using and can import all your data from your accounts. iFinance can monitor your insight stock activity and track all your transactions. An excellent feature of iFinance is that it supports 11 different languages and can be easily converted into the required language as per your Mac preference.

Price: $29.99

7. SEE Finance

Mac

SEE Finance is great software for managing and analyzing your stocks, bonds, ETF’s and other securities. It is connected with many famous and popular financial institutions of which it imports the stock quotes and then creates the watch list and examine the sector exposure, which is a great help for making investments in various securities. SEE Finance with managing your investment also manages your funds, bank accounts, savings and more. With this personnel management software, you can easily categorise your transactions and keep full control over all your finances. The drawback of this software is that it lacks some automatic function and mobile pp.

Price: $29.99

8. Fortora Fresh Finance

Fortora Fresh Finance is financial management software, with its easy user interface you can manage your finances quickly and easily. It helps you in keeping track of your spending and income, making you aware of your current financial position. Fortora Fresh Finance has all the features that you require to manage your finances like schedule your bill payments, prepare budget, generate a report of your spending, record your credit card spending, import data from financial institutions and many more. Fortora Fresh Finance is available for both Mac and Windows.

Price: $49.99

Free Mac Apps

9. quicken

Quicken is simple to use Personal Finance Management Software. It does almost all the work of financial management for you so that you can lead a peaceful life without any worries of finance management. Quicken connects you to your back accounts within some seconds safely and securely, makes your budget on your behalf with your past expenditure details with full customizable facility, helps you in categorizing your expenses and scheduling your bill payments. There are various versions of Quicken Available like Quicken Deluxe, Quicken Premier, Quicken Home & Business, and Quicken Rental Property Manager.

Price: $69.99

10. SplashMoney

SplashMoney is Personal Finance Management Software for all platforms like Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. This software helps you in managing your account from anywhere and anytime. It keeps track of your spending and income and then maintains your budget. Even, you can synchronize your desktop SplashMoney software with your phone so that you are updated with your finances anytime. This also connects you wirelessly to all the banks.

Best Personal Finance App For Mac

Price: $19.95

Yahoo Finance App Mac

Don’t forget to share which Personal Finance Management Software you are using.