5 Financial Retirement Planning Apps to Build Your Net Worth

Financial apps present an easy way to help you track expenses, manage finances and build retirement wealth. These top finance apps help you build your net worth by enabling you to effortlessly track your spending while also saving you some extra cash.

The 21st century presents a myriad of opportunities for managing information easily through automation; which is good since credit makes instant cash all too accessible. Apps can be your best friend when it comes to gathering and assessing your financial data and creating a plan to educate you on where your money is going and how you can more effectively manage your wealth. If retirement is around the corner, this is a great way to monitor your spend, forecast your financial plan and save extra money.

Americans Are Not Saving Enough for Retirement

A recent survey by Bankrate shows that the “median American savings rate hovers right around $0 because people are living paycheck to paycheck and are not proactively managing their finances.” In fact, an estimated 74% of Americans are not prepared for retirement according to new research from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tracking your daily expenses gives you the best view of your finances, and can help you not only improve your nest egg, but also help you hold your financial advisor or wealth manager accountable. Think about it: you can’t manage your expenses and increase your financial potential until you have a good view of your spending and financial assets.

Here are five financial apps to simplify your finances so you can set your future retirement up for success:

1. Mint

Mint is one of the simplest and most popular of the financial planning and budget apps. The free app puts all your balances and transactions in one place.

Since budgeting is the starting point of your personal finance journey, Mint enables you to save for investments you can make that will build your net worth. Mint allows you to create goals, whether that’s buying a car, getting out of debt or saving for retirement, for example, to help decrease your debt and increase your net worth through daily spending habits.

What users appreciate most about Mint is that the transactions are recorded for you. After you link your accounts, Mint will record your purchases and categorize them.

2. Personal Capital

Personal Capital is a free app that focuses on tracking investments and your spending. If you are a seasoned investor, this app can help you get an overview of how your investments are doing, while making you aware of how much you’re spending and how much you’re really saving.

Personal Capital can link all of your bank investments, such as your checking and savings account, IRA and 401k accounts—so you can see them all in one place. Once you link all your accounts, you get convenient, daily app updates on your finances on your phone, tablet or computer.

The Net Worth page gives you an overall picture of your net worth and then breaks down each individual account so you can see how your investments add or subtract from your worth.

3. YNAB

The You Need a Budget (YNAB) philosophy is to help you better your entire financial life through informed budgeting. Their app is web-based with easy transfer between an iPhone or Android app.

YNAB’s app allows you to “give every dollar a job,” making sure you only spend designated amounts on certain categories such as your living expenses, gifts, clothing, dining habits, coffee vice, and more. The helpful app also makes saving easier by urging you to always be saving by setting your “true expenses” and by treating infrequent expenses like holiday and birthday gifts as if they’re monthly expenses, helping you save exponentially over time.

In addition, YNAB offers online classes, helpful guides, a podcast and a YouTube channel with detailed financial saving tips and advice.

4. Every Dollar

EveryDollar is a free, simple, easy-to-use budgeting app that relies on the same idea as the YNAB app; which is to assign financial roles to every dollar.

EveryDollar offers a simple budgeting app interface, and also allows you to incorporate long-term financial goals into your budgeting plan. Here are a few offerings of the financial app:

• You can create your own savings categories and designate money to each.
• The debt section allows you to record how much you owe and dedicate a monthly payment towards each debt category.

The catch to this app is that if you want to link bank accounts to the app, you must pay a fee of $99 a year for EveryDollar Plus. If you stick with the free app, you’re responsible for recording your transactions on your own.

5. Acorns

Acorns offers an investing component that asks you questions about your goals and risk tolerance. The financial app then recommends one of five diversified portfolio of low-cost ETFs.

Acorns doesn’t offer IRAs, so it’s definitely meant for any extra money you’ve got leftover after you’ve funded an emergency fund and your retirement accounts. Also, the app allows you to fund your account in a few different ways.

• You can just set up regular weekly, monthly and custom timeframe of deposits from your bank account.
• You can turn on the “round up” feature, which looks at your credit cards and bank accounts and “rounds up” purchases to the next dollar and funnels the difference into your investments.

Acorns offers an easy way to invest and build wealth for retirement without missing the funds.

The Benefits of a Financial Plan on Auto-Pilot

A financial plan that is on auto-pilot in terms of sending your money automatically to investment accounts, savings accounts and creditors allows you to build wealth effortlessly for the following reasons:

• Automating helps you avoid missing payments.
• You’ll never be tempted to skip savings because you won’t even see the money going directly from your paycheck into your account.

You’ll need to stay up-to-date and manage your accounts to make sure there are no banking errors, but automating and getting ‘big-picture’ financials daily ensures that your investments are growing directly from your paycheck to help set you up for future retirement success.

Connect with a financial advisor or fiduciary to get expert insight into your finances and retirement planning.