9 Best Budgeting Apps For College Students

As a college student, managing your finance can be daunting. To take some stress off of the long-winded process here are the 9 best budgeting apps for college students. These apps are fairly easy to use, and they will make your life so much easier!

1. Mint

Mint is an easy to use budgeting app that was created by the people who made the finance management systems TurboTax and Quickbooks. Mint can be tied to your credit or debit card and helps to guide your day-to-day spending by categorizing and tracking your purchases. You can track things like food expenses, alcohol, and textbooks specifically, so you know exactly what you’ve spent money on as you go about your college life. If this is your first time using a credit card, Mint is useful in the way that it helps you avoid maxing out your card. It literally won’t let you use more money than is available to you! That’s a yay for financial responsibility!

2. Book Scouter

Book Scouter is a great price comparison site where you’re able to compare prices of textbooks that you need using their ISBN number, author, or book title. Basically, it scours the net for the best offers from the 30 sites that are willing to buy your book. This is perfect if you want to sell your book, but need a tool that compares prices across the web.

3. Tab

Tab is the answer to your restaurant or Uber tip problems. It calculates the tip you need to pay (isn’t that always a hassle?), and it also as the ever-so-helpful ability to split your group check if you’re out with friends. A true social life-saver!

4. Wally

Wally is a budgeting app that is easy to use as it’s pretty basic in its tracking system. It tracks your income and expenses. You can either enter your dollar amounts manually and tell Wally what you’ve spent, or you can snap a quick photo and the app take it from there. And aren’t you always forgetting to pay your phone bill? Wally’s got you there too. It alerts you when it’s time to pay up! You can also set alerts for things like spending goals, so you’re always kept in line.

5. BUDGT

BUDGT is an iOS-only app, so sorry about this one Android users. This budgeting app gives you real-time status on what you’re spending and allows you to see exactly what your money is doing. Checking in this with this app will help you decide where and when to spend your money next. It’s a convenient way of keeping yourself accountable for your finances. You can view your daily status at the end of the day so that you’re always keeping on top of your progress and meeting your goals. Like a lot of other apps, BUDGT organizes your finances into categories to help you visualize your spending, which is just what a busy college student like you needs.

6. LearnVest

As its name would suggest, LearnVest aims to demystify your financial experience. It has nifty little folders that you use to sort your spending and create your own categories. You can also set budgets for these individual folders, so if you want to spend more on food than you do on clothing, this is a good way to make sure that happens. They also do a good job in classifying your essentials vs your non-essentials. Usually, essentials are things like rent and students loans (AKA the things that you don’t want to pay but have to).

7. Slice

If you’re someone that does a lot of online shopping, Slice is the app for you. It keeps the receipts and delivery information from your online purchases in one place so you don’t need that huge folder filled with sheets of paper. It’ll keep your entire purchasing history nice and accessible on your phone. Bonus: it also tells you when your package has shipped so you can be on the lookout!

8. Spendee

With an interface that is as cute as it sounds, Spendee is a budgeting app that uses helpful pie-chart and color-coded visuals that provides you a graph of where your money is going. It deducts your current expenses so you know how much you much of your money is available to spend. it’s great if you have a part-time job and need to keep refreshing your balance because it will do that for you. For a small subscription fee, you can also track multiple budgets.

9. PocketGuard

PocketGuard, as the name suggests, prevents you from spending too much. This budgeting app guards you from the pitfalls of overspending by giving you advice on what to do better to save more. You can link this to all the accounts you have, and it’ll help you track your expenses, bills, and savings.