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Keep Your Financial New Year’s Resolutions With Apps & Your Phone

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If you need help keeping your New Year’s Resolutions for money and finances in 2012, consider turning to your iPhone or Android smartphone for help. These powerful companions will do better than a rubber band on your wrist or freezing your credit cards.

With a small collection of apps and online services you can turn your iPhone into a personal assistant that tracks your money, saves you trips to the bank and teach you and your family more about money.

Read More New Year’s Resolution Tips and Apps

The key to keeping New Year’s Resolutions related to money is to have a support system in place, and to track your results. If you track what you are spending and what you are saving, you have a much better chance at making 2012 the year you get your finances under control.

Apps to Help You Keep Your New Year’s Money Resolutions

Mint

The best personal finance app I have found is the Mint app. This free app connects to Mint.com so you can see all of your financial life in the palm of your hand.

Mint iPad app

You can link your checking, savings and credit card accounts to Mint, and most of them will update automatically so that you always have your current financial outlook with you.

The Mint service can be accessed on your iPhone, Android and iPad. This app is a personal favorite, and an integral part of tracking my expenses.

The built in reporting tools make it easy to see where you are spending money so that you can adjust your spending easily. When you synch up, it will import your past several months of spending and automatically categorize many of your purchases so that you can look for places to cut back on right away.

MoneyStrands

MoneyStrands is another great personal finance app that works on your phone and online. The MoneyStrands tool allows you to track your expenses and much more.

Money Strands

My favorite features of the MoneyStrands service and app are the ability to create a budget that works, including 12 months of spending plans. It also lets you collect all of your bills in one place.

The MoneyStrands iPhone app allows you to check your account balances on the go and get push alerts if your accounts get too low, that way you can avoid overdraft fees.

PayPal

If your bank doesn’t have an iPhone or Android app that can capture checks, you need to get the PayPal app and link it to your bank account. With this app you can use your iPhone or Android camera to deposit your check.

https://youtu.be/YXrmxAvPC18

Just sign your check, take photos of the front and back and it will be deposited in your PayPal account within a few days. From there you can transfer the cash to your bank account.

Read: 9 iPhone Check Deposit Apps

I use this all the time to save a trip to the bank, and it works great.

FoolProof

Getting a better grip on your finances during the new year isn’t just for you; it can also be a good time to share smart financial advice with your entire family. The FoolProof financial lessons are aimed at teens, college students and adults.

learn money for new years resolution

If you want to learn as a family, check out the Educate your Kids option, but if you want to learn by yourself, chose FoolProof Solo.

This program is fun and informative, and one of the best ways  have found to learn about finances, tricks used by financial companies and to take control of your spending.

Your Bank’s App

Instead of just getting your current balances in Mint, your bank’s app will allow you to transfer money to avoid overdraft fees.

I suggest keeping some small amount of savings available in a second checking or a dedicated savings account so that you can easily transfer this to your checking account if things start to run low. This can be tough to start if money is tight, but even $100 in backup is enough to help you avoid expensive overdraft fees.

If your bank doesn’t have some form of mobile access, now might be a good time to change banks for one that does offer an app or mobile banking.

When making New Year’s Resolutions about money, you’ll need more than your iPhone or Android to succeed. The best advice I can give it is to get your friends or family on board and to set realistic goals.

Just like crash diets fail, so do crash budgets. Use these tools to set realistic budget goals for 2012, then use these iPhone and Android apps to help you keep your new financial goals.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. HTC Wildfire Apps

    01/01/2012 at 10:23 am

    Cool trick about the paypal tip !!

  2. Personal Finances

    01/02/2012 at 2:33 am

    Checked the FoolProof website, seems pretty cool. Thanks for suggesting it.

  3. Illuum the Happy App

    01/02/2012 at 6:31 am

    Illuum is a new web app to track resolutions, study and improve your happiness.

  4. David Bourne

    01/10/2012 at 6:06 am

    Let someone else
    make and manage your Twitter
    list. Great Idea.
    This App is for Finance & Markets
    junkies and professionals alike and anyone interested in keeping
    up with
    current News and Analysis on the markets.

    This App saves me from having to
    make and update
    Twitter Lists of interesting people like traders, analysts,
    hedgies to follow.

    It
    pulls interesting content articles from lists they make of
    publications,
    journalists, institutions and opinion leaders who publish on
    Twitter.

    This
    App uses some kind of algorithm to review people publishing
    content online
    selecting interesting articles, videos and audio content and
    filtering out
    items considered less interesting.
    The
    lists of people followed and filtered is actively managed and
    look to
    improvements to the App are pushed through routine App updates.

    The
    App’s user interface is well designed and makes it easy to read
    deal news,
    articles and view videos on the iPad, simple and efficient.

    You
    can share or store content you like with Twitter, Facebook and
    Instapaper.

    The
    App continuously monitors and adjusts online source lists to
    include new
    analysts and publications as well as opinion leaders of note.
     
    This
    is one of the best stock market Apps on the iTunes Store.  All their Apps are on
    http://www.algoryt.hm

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