Having a hard time keeping track of your finances? These online money management tools will make life a lot easier, allowing you to set budgets and plan for the future.
1. Mint: One of the best known, most comprehensive money management tools, Mint allows you to create detailed budgets for every aspect of your life, pay bills online, check your credit, and get advice on ways to save. Made by Intuit, Mint is extremely secure, using the same 128-bit encryption that banks use.
2. Credit.com: This platform provides free credit score checks along with personalized advice for how to improve it. It assesses your payment history, telling you how many late payments you’ve had as well as what percentage of available credit you’re using.
Credit.com gives you a letter grade based on the score to make the breakdown easier to understand. The score comes directly from Experian, the leading credit bureau in the United States. Your score is updated on the platform once a month, so you can log in at any time to see how it fluctuates.
3. Planwise: Like Mint, Planwise allows you to set budgets for your spending. You can set spending plans anywhere from two months to 50 years from now. What sets Planwise apart from other tools is the comprehensive graphs it creates to help you understand your finances. It also does not require bank login information as other platforms do.
4. SigFig: SigFig provides personalized investment advice with charts and graphs to help you decide how to best allocate your assets. The platform offers free consultations with financial advisors to help you fix current investments. It syncs your 401(k), IRA, brokerage, and advisor accounts from more than 80 brokerages, pulling all your investments into a single dashboard. SigFig also gives you weekly summaries of investment performances and notifies you of incurred account fees. The tool also provides you with the top news that impacts your portfolio, as well as up-to-the-second stock market quotes, news, and commentary.
5. FINRA BrokerCheck: This free tool helps investors research the professional backgrounds of brokerage firms and brokers currently or formerly registered with FINRA or a national securities exchange. It pulls in information from filings by regulators, firms, and investment professionals, including current licensing status and history, employment history, and reported regulatory, customer dispute, and criminal history, if any. The platform also has Risk Meter and Scam Meter tools that walk you through a series of questions to identify vulnerable individuals and investments. When deciding whether to invest, this is the first place you should go to determine whether the business or individual is legitimate.