The Pros & Cons Of Using Personal Finance Apps To Manage Your Wealth

What is a personal finance app? In essence, it’s an application that helps you get a hold of your financial situation in multiple ways. Perhaps you use an app to manage or discover investment opportunities, or maybe you utilize apps to plan budgets and save money. At first glance, this sounds like the perfect way to control your money and be smarter with your investments/savings. 

And to be fair, that’s true for a lot of apps! 

Many personal finance apps are extremely beneficial, though there are equally as many that are not. The fact is that these apps come with some pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you download one. 

Pro: Better Money Management

Let’s begin with a clear benefit: personal finance apps help you keep your money in check better than you can alone. A budgeting app will often give you a clear overview of what you’re spending money on every month. You’ll see a list of subscriptions or bills, and a clear understanding of what you can cancel to save money immediately. 

Investment apps help you manage your money by helping you make regular investments. You can even get professional financial advice through some apps to teach you the best things to invest in. Pick the right app, and you can undoubtedly gain a better handle on money management. 

Con: You’re Often Pestered By Customer Support

The customer support mars many personal finance apps. Rather than providing you with help and assistance, customer support teams will often contact you and try to upsell different services. They ask you if you want this or that; it’s all very overbearing and annoying. 

Personal Capital is probably the worst at this – if you’ve downloaded or used this app in the past, you’ve likely been bombarded with emails or messages encouraging you to invest more money or look into a different financial package. It’s super annoying, but choosing a Personal Capital alternative can help you avoid all of the pestering. Some personal finance apps are way better than others and will only contact you with important things like security concerns or updates to the T&Cs. You need to do your research to avoid all of the applications with aggressive customer service teams. 

Pro: Can Develop Better Financial Habits

There’s no doubt that the best personal finance apps will help you build better financial habits. You can look at saving or investment apps as a fantastic example of this with the “round-ups” feature. Loads of apps use this, and the idea is that you connect a bank account and it rounds up every purchase, saving the extra money. 

E.g. You buy something for $47, but it rounds up to $50, and the $3 extra goes into a savings/investment account. 

You are, effectively, building better financial habits by saving more money every time you buy something. Other apps have other features that encourage positive habits – such as budgeting tools to help restrict your monthly expenditure. 

Con: Might Be Overloaded With Information

Sometimes, these apps aren’t aware of their clientele. They bombard you with loads of information, graphs, and data related to money. It makes sense to someone with a degree in accounting and finance, but the average person doesn’t have a clue what any of it means. 

Basically, the apps make money more confusing because they show you far too much info and use loads of technical financial jargon. This makes it hard for you to see the benefits of the application because you don’t really understand what any of it means. 

Pro: See Accurate Financial Projections

It’s really useful when you can see into the future and get a sense for how things will be in 5, 10, or 25 years. That’s one of the main things getting in the way of your financial management; you want to save or invest, but you’re too focused on the now. It’s way better when you broaden your scope and see the benefits of saving/investing years into the future. 

Personal finance apps do this by giving you accurate financial projections. A retirement planning app can take what you’re saving every month and show you how much this equates to when you retire. It’s a fantastic way of understanding how much you need to save, and it also shows you that your saving habits are beneficial in the long run. This gives you a nice boost of positivity and encourages you to carry on saving. 

The best way to end this post is by saying that some personal finance apps are a lot better than others. If you shop around and read various reviews, you’ll find applications that deliver all of these pros with none of the cons. 

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