Best Budgeting Apps

Nowadays, tracking your spending is essential to stay aware about any threats related to your financial life. Also, you can organize your finances better, keeping in mind your monthly income, essential expenses, etc. It can help you to establish and follow saving goals too for future plans like trips or house improvements.

One good way to track your expenses and categorize them is to use budgeting apps. These apps offer tools that can help you with budgeting and provide other financial services.

Budgeting apps can be a beacon into your financial life, helping you to have a healthy relationship with your money.

In South Africa, you can get access to a variety of budgeting apps, most of them for free, with user-friendly platforms and customer-centric approach.

Read this article until the end to discover the best budgeting apps in South Africa and learn more about their features, benefits, disadvantages, how to download, etc. So, let’s embark on this adventure!

What is Budgeting?

Budgeting is the action of creating a budget and establishing a financial plan to track your income, expenses (essential or non-essential). This process is important because you can avoid some threats like overspending or missing saving goals.

Also, categorizing your expenses helps you a lot to see which area you can cut and save some money.

The cost of living in South Africa has increased in recent years, this fact ensures the need of a realistic financial plan to have a healthy relationship with your money.

Budgeting correctly isn’t an easy task for many people, but with the right financial education and tools like budgeting apps, you can do it with no hassle.

Drawing a budget

Before establishing a budget, you need to keep some things in mind, see below:

Income

To create a good financial plan and a realistic budget, you need to understand your current financial situation. It starts with your monthly earnings, it’s time to calculate all the money you get per month.

Collect all information about your monthly income like your salary, bonuses, investments, etc. It’s important to determine how much money you earn every month, see which sources of income are stable and others are not.

Expenses

See what are your monthly expenses, make a list and categorize them between essential and non-essential. It’s important to understand how much you should spend to pay the indispensable expenses like rent, mortgage repayments, groceries, utility bills like electricity and gas, and the other expenses that aren’t as important as essential things. Examples of non-essential expenses are concert tickets, purchase of a new smartphone, streaming subscriptions and more.

Also, you need to separate them between fixed and variable expenses, fixed can’t be changed and variables have a variation month to month. So, stay aware about that difference, this will guide you to have a clear idea about your expenses every month.

Remember, carefully review your expenses every month, don’t spend more than you earn, the budgeting apps will help you with this task. Overspending can drive you to a debt cycle and a financial burden.

Priorities

Before starting budgeting, you need to understand what your priorities are, this is important to set saving goals for retirement, trips, home improvements and more. This is a pivotal point to have a clear idea of what is most important for you.

Setting priorities and goals, you will know if you’re in the right way or not to achieve your goals.

Flexibility

You need to have flexibility to change your plans when necessary, you can face unexpected challenges and it can change a lot of things in your life.

Examples of unpredictable things are: you can be fired, a salary cut, some problems with your extra sources of income, etc. You need to set a realistic budget, understanding that things can happen, one good tip is make an emergency fund and a plan for when those challenges appear.

In these situations, you will need good tools to help you to track your expenses correctly, the budgeting apps can support you with this task.

Now, it’s time to know what are the best budgeting apps in South Africa.

Best budgeting Apps in South Africa

Tracking your spending and categorizing your expenses are essential things to achieve financial goals and have a healthy relationship with your money. So, to do it you should have the correct tools to help in this process, see below the best budgeting apps in South Africa:

1 – 22seven

Developed by Old Mutual, this app stands out as one of the best budgeting apps in South Africa. It offers users the possibility of tracking their spending, setting saving goals like trips or retirement funds, creating a personalised budget, finding some insights about your spending and much more.

Over 580,000 South Africans use this app, ensuring the quality of services they provide.

You can download and use this app just for free, it’s a really cost-effective solution for your financial life, providing the right tools to create a budget and manage it correctly.

Also, you can connect this app with your bank accounts, credit cards and investments accounts. You shouldn’t have any worries, 22seven supports over 120 financial institutions in South Africa, including respected banks like Absa, Capitec, Capitec, FNB, Nedbank, Standard Bank, TymeBank, Discovery Bank, etc.

22seven App is available for Android, iOS and Huawei.

2 – Spendee

This personal finance app is a good tool to help you manage your financial life. Spendee offers the possibility of tracking your spending, creating budgets, categorizing expenses, managing your money in multiple currencies and much more. 

You also can connect this app with your bank accounts, credit cards and investments accounts, etc. Spendee provides a user-friendly interface to its users, offering an ease-of-use platform overall.

In addition, with this app you can set alerts and reminders to remember you to pay bills, to not exceed your budget and more. With a customer-centric approach, you can personalise your spending by categorizing expenses, adding a picture and location to every transaction.

Spendee can be ideal for couples, families and roommates, because the possibility of sharing their budget and expenses with other people, everyone can handle it with their permission.

This app won the Mobile UX Awards in 2017, ensuring their commitment to provide a user-friendly experience to its customers.

Spendee is available for Android in the Google Play Store and for iOS in the App Store. The app has a free version, but other features are paid, you can pay for it annually. 

3 – GoodBudget

This is a budgeting app that allows you to track your spending efficiently. GoodBudget is a good tool to help you to create a budget, set saving goals, share expenses with other people and much more.

Also you can sync it with other devices to track your spending on-time. This app has a free version, but other features are paid. 

This app provides a user-friendly interface to help you to navigate into your financial life with no hassle. It will help you with your financial planning and achieve your goals. 

GoodBudget is available for Android in Google Play Store and for iOS in App Store.

There are the best budget apps in South Africa, review all features carefully and choose the best fit to you. It’s time to organize your finances better by tracking and categorizing expenses and saving to achieve your goals.

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