These Apps Can Finally Get You to Save Money

Are you searching for apps to help control you money spending disposition?

There are growing set of apps can help with the self-control that it takes to save money for the future. Apps like Acorns, Digit.co, Level Money and Mint track all the ways you spend to tell you in one glance how to stay on budget. Some even squirrel away extra cash before you blow it.

Apps are key to getting millennials back on financial track. The generation America most likes fretting about—adults under 35—has a savings rate of negative 1.9%, says Moody’s MCO 0.07 % Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. (The savings rate for everyone 50 and under is also just south of zero.)

Some apps like SmartyPig and SavedPlus, helps control the temptation to spend. Digit is the simplest—and the most ambitious. It operates like a benevolent pickpocket, yanking money out of your hands before you can spend it, then keeping it safe on your behalf.

When you give Digit the login to your checking account, it watches for extra money in your budget. Every few days, it hides away up to $50 in a savings account assigned to you. It is free, and Digit’s virtual piggy bank is FDIC-insured.

Acorns takes your spare change—rounding up to the nearest dollar on the purchases you make with credit and checking accounts. (It’s a bit like Bank of America BAC 0.46 % ’s Keep the Change program, but works across all of your accounts.) You can also tell Acorns to take a designated amount daily, weekly or monthly. But there’s a cost. If your portfolio surpasses $5,000, the firm charges 0.25% of your holdings each year. If you have less, it charges $1 a month. So if you start the year with $200 and finish with $250, you pay 6% in fees. (For more advanced investors, apps like Betterment and Wealthfront may offer better fees.  Journal written extensively about the booming market for investing apps.).

One of the most-used apps on my phone is Mint, a personal finance service that’s been around since 2006. You give Mint logins for your bank, credit-card and investment accounts, and it creates a 30,000-foot view of your financial life.

A newer app called Level Money goes a long way toward simplifying the most important question in the moment: How much money can I spend? Level looks at all of the same data as Mint, then boils it down: A big circle on your phone or smartwatch says how much money you can spend today, this week, or this month—and still stay on track with bills and savings goals.

Source: WSJ