Wondering if anyone has a preference for financial or budget apps?
Doing a re-evaluation of budget, finances, and (mainly) how credit cards are used / managed for their rewards. 2025 is a year of looking at my credit cards and seeing are there any values for them. I recently shifted to a different set of cards because the rewards were better than my old setup.
Obviously, now that I added this extra piece into my setup, I went from 3 cards to 6 cards managing (and potentially another 1-3 more will be added later in the year)
As I go through this process, wondering if it’s better to just stick to my usual Excel spreadsheet of itemizing expenses paired with which cards get more reward, OR if there was a good app that pulled all that information in.
Side notes: (in case anyone is wondering)
all credit cards are paid in full each month
no balances are carried over
why all this trouble? I have a large family, if I can find ways to save money on flights/hotels using points then I want to use credit cards that align with the goals and rewards.
I haven’t found anything that rivals YNAB. I get paid monthly and I feel that having YNAB has made it a lot easier to manage and stay on track. I know the subscription can be considered pricey, but I haven’t found anything close to it.
The time and sanity it saves me makes the subscription worth it.
I remember Budgetwise.io was going to be a contender, but the development has been really slow.
Edit: I have a note in Obsidian that lists each credit card and the rewards. There might be an app that can do rewards. I think it’s been mentioned on Frequent Miler before. Might be easier to rotate the cards in your wallet as needed. Or just group categories by card in your spreadsheet.
I only have two cards, a cash-back card from my bank, and a travel card. And my bank has a feature that allows me to track the transactions of both and download everything as a CSV. So keeping track with a spreadsheet is all I need.
Would an app save you time or allow you to make better decisions? If not . . .
Been using YNAB for years and don’t foresee myself ever stopping. I find it way easier than my old Numbers sheet. Helps me and my wife stay on budget by category.
I thought about an app for a while. After Mint, there have been a plethora (Rocket Money, Empower, Monarch, etc), but then I always question should I trust these apps in handling my finances in terms of connecting accounts, etc.
I’ve tried over 100 Mac+iOS apps. I was using HomeBudget w/ Sync for ages, but lack of privacy for transactions and app being abandoned made me look for an alternative.
BudgetFlow is it. Lifetime $50 is a steal for this app for both Mac and iOS /iPad OS
I have 6 cards I use for various reasons/benefits. I am rather meticulous about tracking, which is a personality trait more than anything I suppose. Because I prefer to use an envelope style system, rather than a traditional budgeting approach, Moneydance is my program (with companion app) of choice. There are many options, it just depends on your preferred level of involvement and effort.
Monarch Money rivals YNAB but with a different philosophy. I find people either like one or the other, so if you click with YNAB, Monarch likely isn’t for you.
A second vote for Actual Budget. Moved from YNAB a few months ago, as the YNAB prices just kept creeping up and up and the promised grandfather pricing wasn’t honoured for to long after they went to the cloud.
Have it running on PikaPods, rather than self hosting, purely as it was dead simple to setup and saves any headaches for something that gets used daily.
In case anyone is looking at this, you don’t have to use PikaPods or self-hosting with Actual if you don’t need to sync with any banks or don’t need to access on any other devices.
For me, everything is local to my laptop and that’s preferred for my use.
Thanks for the reminder about the possibility of hosting Actual Budget on PikaPods. I gave it another look and set it up this afternoon. It was dead simple (I spent more time reading up on it than actually doing it), and it imported my YNAB data flawlessly.
My YNAB subscription doesn’t renew until June, so I have some time to see whether Actual Budget will be a good choice for me, but I’m very impressed so far. I won’t be at all surprised if I end up making the move.
Not that I have any regrets about using YNAB for the last several years. It taught me a budgeting system and overall approach to money that I’ve found tremendously helpful. But I can keep using the same method in Actual Budget, and if I’ve learned the method so well that I can now spend +/-$19 per year (for PikaPods hosting) instead of $109 + tax, that’s a YNAB win, right?
I quite like Monarch Money for keeping track of what I spend money on. I used YNAB for a while, but it seemed more suited for budgeting than keeping track of what I was spending on, and really I was trying to keep track of spending rather than budget. If this resonates, give Monarch Money a try.
FWIW, I’m using Quicken for Mac. I find it’s pretty good for basic financial tracking and I like that it seems to connect easily with most of the financial institutions I use. This was not always the case with some of the other applications I had struggled with in the past (Banktivity). That’s why I switched to Quicken for Mac and I find it’s pretty good.
I’ve been using SEE Finance for years. It has a no-nonsense interface and has been rock solid and bug free. iCloud sync between iOS and Mac. One time purchase.
I use Banktivity and it is mostly good. Sync works on bank/credit cards very well. Investments is hit or miss. I do a monthly close/reconciliation and it is pretty quick using the app.
I used Quicken for many years and was surprised and disappointed when Intuit stopped selling and supporting it in the UK. I tried several alternatives, but never found one that worked as well. Many, like Quicken, are no longer available.
Consequently I switched to using a Numbers spreadsheet over ten years ago. I can download bank and card statements as csv files and add a category and note. I can produce graphs of account balances and expenditure on specific categories, with comparison against budget. I am retired and living on pension so no longer need to manage active investments. I import my pension value and passive investments as csv files to separate tabs and have a dashboard tab giving an overview of my financial position.
Numbers provides a perfectly adequate solution to my needs. Personal finance apps seem to appear and disappear rapidly, so I cannot see myself switching away from my spreadsheet.
I use Cashculator for macOS. It’s really good for planning ahead and forecasting, even without meticulous data entry (though you can do that too). Different from most other apps, it will not fit everyone but worth looking into.