Cut Down Spending With These 14 Money-Saving Apps
You have more choices than ever when it comes to buying stuff. On top of malls, mom-and-pops, big boxes, and your friendly neighbourhood store, you have entire shopping emporiums on the Internet.
With a galaxy of choices at your fingertips, it can be difficult to commit to a budget or even set one. But you know that you have to buy things at some point; unless you grow a prolific garden, you need food to put on the table.
Fortunately, the same technology that has spawned these choices has given rise to applications designed to help you cut down spending. Some help you fix a budget. Some give you coupons to steep deals. Some facilitate price comparisons, while others suggest affordable restaurants. Some even earn money.
These apps will lead you down the path of frugality in no time:
Unsplurge’s developers know the story well: Person sets budget, then watches it unravel —all because no one holds him or her accountable.
What sets Unsplurge from other budgeting tools is that it leverages the power of peer support. This app keeps you on the wagon by displaying their budget goals to other users, with the goal of getting them to motivate you. Sometimes a pat on the back is all you need to avoid flushing your money down the drain. Businesses would do well to include this in a suite of apps to streamline their operations.
Pocket Expense Personal Finance
You never have to be reckless with your income again, not with the way this app keeps track of your financial accounts. Whether they’re credit cards or checking accounts, Pocket Expense lets you set a budget for them, each marked with distinguishable icons. The app also offers easy fund transfer between budgets and a dependable alert system for bills.
Many apps jam-pack a lot of features into their interface, making budgeting harder than it already is. Spending Tracker goes for minimalism, allowing you to input expenses in a simple manner and check them against weekly to yearly budget objectives.
Like Spending Tracker, Saver also takes pride in simplicity. Just tap entries (expenses) on the go and the app will remember them. The app then lets you categorise them across 15 labels, each of which can be broken down into more categories.
This app might be your new best friend. It’s basically a repository of sales circulars, notifying you about weekly specials from more than a hundred participating brands. You can add these on-sale items to your grocery list, which you can create as many of and organise by aisles.
As a rule of (green) thumb, in-season food is the way to go when it comes to frugal living. This free app tells you what nearby farmer’s markets and farm shares have on offer, i.e. what is fresh, locally sourced, and cheap, as opposed to supermarket stocks.
Food wastage is a disservice to the environment and to you. Avoid it by downloading this app, which takes note of items you have bought according to their expiry dates as well as their price. Next time you’re in the supermarket, the app will give you a heads up on which products are spoiling.
Cull a shopping list directly from your recipes, so you don’t have to shop for unnecessary items. Ziplist lets you choose from thousands of recipes, add their ingredients to your grocery list, and share such lists with friends and family.
Groupon
Are you a coupon queen or king? Then you surely wouldn’t be caught outside without this app on your phone or tablet. The app is your bridge to great deals, i.e. steep discounts of up to 85 percent, on everything from a massage to a weekend trip to Minnesota.
Alternatively, you have Groupon’s fierce competitor Living Social. It goes toe to toe with Groupon in many areas and almost always offers the same deals as Groupon.
Crackerjacks Sergey Brin and Larry Page could not resist wading into the coupons game so much so they tried to buy Groupon. The latter refused, and Google Offers was born. It positions itself as the bigger-budget dark horse to the abovementioned apps. Aside from being the most financially solvent brand, Offers has one thing over the competition: easiest integration with Google Maps for better sifting of local deals.
Apt to be mentioned by deal hunters is Coupon Sherpa, a pioneer in the field of mobile coupons. Coupon Sherpa comes pre-loaded with vouchers ready for claiming at a broad scope of partner establishments.
Now we come to a rising class of apps: those that not only let you save money but gain it. One of these apps, Jingit, lets you earn just by watching ads online; scanning items at stores; and answering questionnaires. A download of the app gives you earnings upfront.
This is just like Jingit, but you have to buy the product or service advertised. The earnings are higher as a result. After watching the ad or taking a poll, go to the designated store and make your purchase. Just photograph the receipt for Ibotta to start processing your pay.
Conclusion
These apps are great in their own ways but sometimes all you need is to whip out your trusty calculator. Your mobile device is apt to have one.
Besides apps, your device can also help you save money through price-matching. This is the rising practice of physical stores to lower the price of an item if you can show them a better deal elsewhere.
So the next time you queue for a product, browse the web to see how much it costs in other stores; this is where those price comparison apps come in handy. Show the lower offer to the cashier. Chances are, the store has a price-matching policy and will stoop down to that offer. It’s wise to check if the store has this policy beforehand though.
As you may see, spending is easy nowadays, but frugality is even easier with the help of these apps.
Share this:
Category: Saving Money, Smart Phone Apps
