buzz muddleheaded: Best iPhone app to help budget your money

Best iPhone app to help budget your money

There are lots of apps out there to help you take control of your financial life and budgeting apps for iPhone are no exception. While expense and bill tracking apps can give you your financial position at a glance, they don't do much to help you save money or deter you from spending money you can't afford to. That's where budgeting apps come in handy.

Mint.com not only shows you brief summaries of all your accounts and cash flows but lets you set up budgets for yourself complete with alerts and custom categories. If you need a little help staying on track, Mint.com can provide it.

Mint.com allows you to add bank accounts and credit card accounts which will begin filtering in transactions related to your balances and transactions. This will filter into the cash flow section and show you how much you've spent compared to what you've earned.

The main feature of Mint.com that really sets is apart from standard expense tracking apps is the ability to budget your money where needed. Under the budgets section you can set a master budget for the month as well as break it down by category. You can set budgets for anything you'd like so if you want a gas and transportation budget that's separate from an eating out budget, you can easily do so. You'll see a nicely laid out menu that shows each budget and a horizontal graph representation of how much you have left. The bar is green as long as you're still within that budget for the month. If you exceed the budget, the bar will turn red, therefore drawing attention to itself easily.

Mint.com will set up some generic budget accounts for you but you can add, edit, or delete them as wanted along with creating your own custom budget categories. You can also add transactions directly from the budget screen, or any screen in the app for that matter. Just tap the create new icon in the lower right hand corner of Mint.com and you can add a transaction manually. This is nice for times when you pay with cash instead of your bank card or credit cards. Since those are automatically pulled in if you have them linked, there's no need to manually add them.

A lot of budget apps that are available in the App Store require you to manually enter information which can be clunky and time consuming. Since Mint.com pulls from all major credit card and bank providers, there's almost nothing left to do except to create budgets and add the occasional cash transaction. You can easily see your budgets at a glance and Mint.com will notify you if you exceed a budget for the month so you can try and stay on track or cut expenses elsewhere. You can also log in to your Mint.com account on the web for even more useful tools and data comparisons.

If saving money and having tighter control of your finances is a goal, Mint.com can definitely help you get there.