4 Best Apps to Help You Budget for College
Starting college is a time for new experiences. For many people, it’s the first time they will be cooking their own food or doing their own laundry. It’s also a time where you’ll have to start to learn how to budget your finances! Depending on where you live and where you go to college, you may get money directly to your account from education loan finance, the government, your parents, or potentially all of these, as well as other sources. If you’re about to start college or university, then you’ll quickly learn what happens when you give money to young students in bulk. It often doesn’t last long. With the allure of new things and a few thousand dollars in your bank account, it can feel like the cash will never run out, but after a couple of weeks of new clothes and eating out, the money won’t last long. To help budget, many apps have made it onto the market that may be able to help.
Monzo
Monzo is a bank and a banking app that has become very popular over the last few years. The app allows you to take advantage of the usual banking benefits you’d expect, such as a debit card, transfer services, and an optional overdraft. The difference is that there are no physical banks, and everything happens through their very sophisticated mobile app. You can set limits on spending and create pots for bills, food, and other things to help you budget. The most important function is that you get instant feedback on when you spend and what you’re spending your money on. Use the internal graph function to see what percentage of your monthly allowance is going on food or personal care, for example, and take actions to curb any unnecessary spending.
Mint
Mint is a budgeting app that, like Monzo, allows you to create budgets on an online app. The benefit of Mint is that you don’t need to open a new bank account, and it links to all the bank accounts that you already have open. This gives you a great holistic view of your spending and where your money is at any one time.
Slice
Slice is a great app that’s best used to track your online spending and purchases. Rather than going through your emails to find shipping information and receipts, this app keeps everything together for you. The app will even send you notifications on the status of your order, so you know when it’s scheduled for delivery.
CheckPlease
This is a perfect app for if you find you’re eating out or shopping with groups regularly, and allows you to easily split a bill between many people. This is perfect for the next time you get the McDonald’s breakfast in or need to split a pizza between a large group of people. The app can handle splitting the bill up to 100 ways, so that you won’t have any issues.
