10 Money-Management Tools to Effectively Manage Your Personal Finance

To those who feel guilty that they are not managing their personal finances in a disciplined way, the good news is that majority of people are going the same route. If it were 80s, we could have blamed it on the absence of money-management tools, but we live in the age of information which has already provided us with some very useful online money-management tools that helps us in managing our personal finance in a very convenient way, and at one place.

Money management tools offer various utility functions like budgeting, banking, planning, investing, reporting, and tax management options to help us better manage our day-to-day finances. They also provide us with a great level of privacy, security, usability, performance, and scalability. By providing us with these tools, technology has become our personal finance manager.

We've listed 10 most effective money-management tools available online, that allows you to get a track of your finances for better and seamless wealth management. Some of these allow you to track cash flow by organizing all your financial information, other apps let you do your budgeting, export data, and work offline.

1. Mint.com: It's free, convenient, and easy-to-use since its launch in 2009. It takes in your account info and gives you a financial overview, showing where you are splurging your money. Keeping that in mind, you can then start saving more. It also offers planning of budgets and future expenses.

   Cons: Sometimes it gives you silly suggestions on savings like switching accounts for insignificant savings, or actions with the same bank for little or no savings.

2. YNAB (You Need A Budget): This is especially for people who need to remain close to their budget as they may be running tight-pocketed due to a debt to pay off. The tools will teach you how you can pay out a debt and how in the future, you can stay out of debt. It gives you pie-charts that show how you are progressing in your spending habits.

   Cons: Since the application is not online, it requires you to manually input all the information.

3. Buxfer: It lets you sign in with your Google or Facebook account. Its design is very simple and easy-to-use. It’s simple yet effective tabs structure, useful bars and graphs, and ability to track spending for groups makes it one of the most well known money-management tools available.

   Cons: Limited options for investment and saving options.

4. Money Dance: It's straightforward desktop program and its user interface is very intuitive. Its budgeting features are powerful and it also provides solid reporting options. It also allows you to create multiple accounts for multiple budgets to manage more than one group of finance.

   Cons: It doesn't provide budgeting goals and retirement planning options.

5. Budget Pulse: It's a perfect tool for budget planning. It's simple and very functional as it allows you to track spending, set financial goals, and take control of your finances. It supports splitting large transactions into proper categories. You don't have to share your credit or banking information which it keeps your data secure.

   Cons: Data inputting is done manually, also it doesn't offer any installed deployment model like similar budgeting tools.

6. Geezeo: It has a very clean design and it offers many management tools through banks and credit unions. It gives you good budget planning features and allows you to track your debt and saving goals.

   Cons: Problems in setting up accounts with some banks and no multiple login options with the same bank.

7. Yodlee: It helps you in money management through its various programs that are integrated with financial institutions. It's easy to upload spending data with this tool, and easy to analyze where you are spending your money. A unique feature is its ability to share either all or parts of accounts within Yodlee.

   Cons: Clunky user interface, and static categorization.

8. Personal Capital: This is a web based app which focuses more on investment side of personal finance including retirement, asset allocation, and taxes. It comes with great tools like 401(k) analyzer that tells you your retirement planning fees and costs, and other features like investment checkup, asset allocation, and fund cost for better investment planning.

   Cons: Fees are higher than most competitors.

9. Inex Finance: It keeps track of every single transaction in a color coded way. It's a great way to get a holistic view of your accounts to track where they are heading. With this tool, you can efficiently manage your debts, monitor your installments, and schedule recurring payments, so you can achieve your short and long term goals.

   Cons: Mobile app version is slow and needs to be optimized for better user experience.

10. Your Own Bank's or Credit Union's Tools: A handful of financial institutions offer money-management tools that encourage its users for savings, and investments. Most of these tools are not as well known because users prefer the independent tools like the ones mentioned above because of their serious programs and features. However, there are some tools from the financial institutions which have a good customer base like Bank of America's Keep the Change program, Citibank's suit of financial tools, etc.

There are some other useful online money-management tools for your personal finance which are free and easy to use. They are Smarty Pig, My Money Circles, Money-rates, Annual Credit Report, Pear Budget, and many more.