Free Budget Planners for Taking Control of Your Money

Let's face it, paying bills with your hard-earned money is stressful and overwhelming, especially when you're trying to stick to a budget. Having a budget planner can help with this situation. It may not take away all the stress, but being in control of your money and setting financial goals will empower you and your financial future.

Are you ready to start saving money, set and achieve financial goals, pay down debts, and stop overspending? Check out these free budget planners and choose the one that's right for you.

1. Mint

Mint seems to be the most popular digital budget planner for folks who want to manage their finances in order to save as much money as possible. With automatic expense, banking, and investment tracking Mint helps you stay on track. In addition, it sends you alerts, weekly summaries, instant notifications of large or suspicious transactions, and much more.

Available versions: Mobile app and web.

2. Honeydue

This free budget planner is the perfect choice for couples who manage household expenses together. Each person can create their own budget and communicate through the app. You'll both be able to track expenses, purchases, financial accounts, and create categories with spending limits for each. No need to worry about late fees since Honeydue also sends bill reminders.

Available versions: Mobile app only.

3.EveryDollar

If you'd rather not link your accounts and can live without automatic tracking, this budget planning tool from Dave Ramsey may be a good choice for you. You can manually set and track savings goals, enter due dates for your expenses, add notes to your spending habits, create customizable budget categories, and add multiple incomes.

Available versions: Mobile and web.

4. Personal Capital

Personal Capital has a variety of free budget planning tools to help you monitor your personal finances, retirement, and investments. You'll get a real-time view of all your accounts in one place, find out your net worth, plan your savings, automatically organize your spending and savings, and set a monthly spending target to stay on budget.

While this budget planner does offer your basic personal finance management, it's geared more toward investing and retirement planning. In fact, it has a reputation for being the best budget planner for investors.

Available versions: Mobile and web versions.

5. PocketSmith

Not only does PocketSmith let you plan your current budget, but you can get a look into your future. For instance, if you're planning on buying a house or making another big-ticket item purchase, you can see how the purchase could affect your budget up to six months into the future.

Do you want to create a daily or weekly budget rather than a monthly one? That won't be a problem with this budget planner.

The free plan requires you to manually import your banking information and transactions. In addition, you can only add two accounts and are allowed 12 budgets.

Available versions: Web.

6. Schwab Moneywise

Unlike some of the other free budget planners we've mentioned that offer automatic tracking and insights based on your budget and spending, Schwab relies on you to do your own tracking on paper, which isn't a bad thing if that's what you prefer. However, the digital budget planning tools that automate the process and offer advice, may be more effective in helping you stay on track.

From Schwab's website, manually enter your income, expenses, savings, and investments. Then click the "Calculate Results" button for the totals. From that point, print out your income and expenses.

To manually track your spending habits, download the free Spending Tracker PDF file.

Which Free Budget Planner is Best for You?

	EveryDollar	Honeydue	Mint	Personal Capital	PocketSmith	Schwab
Automatically Tracks Expenses	Only Paid Plan	Yes	Yes	Yes	Only Paid Plans	No
Automatically Tracks Account Balance	Only Paid Plan	Yes	Yes	Yes	Only Paid Plans	No
Investment Tracking	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Sends Due Date Reminders	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Sends Spending Alerts	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Set Savings Goals	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Once you've decided on a free budget planner that's right for you, start creating that budget so you can see what changes you need to make in regards to spending and saving.

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