AppTudes Top Five – Home Finance Apps

Adapted from Lisa’s post on 148apps.com

Ouch! What a week on Wall Street. The US credit rating was downgraded and as we all saw played out on the news, the stock market went on a wild ride taking a serious overall beating. It’s no secret  that the global economy is precarious to say the least. But there are small things we all can do to make at minimum our personal and home finances and debt management work better. And we can start saving for, and investing in, our futures.

We have collected our favorite five apps for that purpose, with the hopes that making small local changes prompts everyone to push for big global changes too. Unfortunately few are free, but hopefully users will recoup the cost many times over if they stick with the plan and all the titles work on both iPhone and iPad as universal apps or in separate versions, If we missed your favorite please leave a note in the comments

Pageone Pro – Money And Bills

Buy Pageone Pro Here

Download Pageonce – Money and Bills Here

$12.99 – Free – Universal

Pageonce – Money and Bills allows users to track and organize credit cards, investments, bank accounts and cash. The app sends real-time alerts when a payment is due or other action is required. It’s a very versatile expense tracker allowing for monitoring of frequent flier miles, cell minutes, data usage and other features, iOS will users will find especially helpful. The app even alerts users to potentially fraudulent charges, and helps track and mange debts, The free version is ad-supported, for the $12.99 Pro users get an ad-free interface as well as a “refresh all” option and unlimited tracking of manually entered expenses and bills. Both versions sync securely with many major US banks, credit unions and credit card providers.

Bills ~ On your table

Buy Bills On your table Here

Buy Bills On your table HD Here

$3.99 – $4.99

Looking for something a bit simpler to just stay on top of recurring bills? Bills ~ On your table has a beautiful interface, especially on iPad. This award winning financial app lets users track regular expenses with ease. The app is not meant to track one time charges, it’s a monthly (or weekly) reminder system that sends a push notification and accompanying sound-alert to remind users when it’s time to pay that credit card bill, mortgage or car payment or tuition. The app uses clound syncing to make sure all members of the household have the same information, and it allows for partial payments which is helpful for managing large debts. There are 170 currencies supported making it a truly global app. A free online user account is required.

iAllowance (allowance and Chore Tracker w/Sync)

Buy iAllowance Here

$3.99  - Universal

Remember piggy banks? Well, while teaching kids the value of money has never been more important, leave the breakable cute containers in the past and get serious about money with kids using iAllowance. It’s a universal app that allows parents to create banks for multiple children and sync those accounts with the rest of the family across devices. The app can handle automatic payments, chore tracking and even calculate interest on the various banks as required. This app allows not just for multiple kids, but multiple accounts, so if your teen has an iTunes allowance and a recreation allowance they can be easily created, managed, and funded separately. In lieu of actual money, parents can opt for a star rewards system, and the app has AirPrint and Dropbox support and parental controls.

Debt Free – Pay Off your Debt With Debt Snowball Method

Buy Debt Free Here

Download Debt Free Lite Here

$.99 – Free – Universal

Ah that precious credit rating. It can mean the difference between capitalizing a low housing costs or forever trying to find an alternative to a credit card payment. It also shapes our sense of who we are – being in debt is frightening and disheartening for everyone. And, if recent news is to believed it spares no one from a social assistance recipient to the wealthiest people and companies in the world. The Debt Snowball method is a popular debt management solution. In essence those with lots of overdue bills pay the minimum payments on all but one . Users focus on paying the most threatening bill, say, a credit card, off entirely. Once it’s eliminated the payments that were going there can be redistributed to the remaining debts and a new one, say the mortgage, becomes the focus. Over time the amount saved snowballs in the hope that debt becomes first more manageable and ultimately erased without the need for bankruptcy or foreclosure. What Debt Free does is automate and simplify the process using a super intuitive GUI. It takes very little time to input information on various debts for the app  to create a model and a system to get the mess back under control. The app is universal, has various visual displays including graphs and pie charts, payment date notifications and much more. And the app supports a large number of currencies so it will support international users as well as American ones.

Economy

Buy Economy Here

Buy Economy for iPad here

$1.99 – $3.99

For most of us, making heads or tails of all the information, and misinformation, on the US economy is all but impossible. Cascade Software offers a quality at-a-glance solution for making sense of the headlines and reports, and more importantly, what they mean to us. The app, while not officially endorsed by any federal or state agency, is powered by FRED API which is the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The app provides users with information on key economic indicators and visual data in the form of easy-to-read graphs that track everything from GDP over time, to which party was in power during any dips. Find employment, housing, inflation, manufacturing and other stats, as well as current North American exchange rates. All 50 states are tracked by five key economic indicators as well, to make sure local information is as clear as national trends.

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†Prices accurate at time of posting but are subject to change without prior warning on the App Store.