6 must-have personal finance apps

“Consumers are the first line of defense,” Conroy says.

While Mint will alert Bona when a bill is due, she can’t use it to actually make the payment. It’s what Schwanhausser calls a “you-can-view-but-you-can’t-do” app.

Indeed, a chief criticism of nearly all personal-finance apps is that there’s not one app that can budget, transfer money and pay bills too.

Mint says its “readable-only” function is actually a good thing, in that it doesn’t allow you, or anyone else, to deposit or withdraw money, move money around or pay bills.

Bona turns to her Chase bank account for online bill paying.

Schwanhausser is seeing banks moving closer toward the one-stop approach of turning the interface of online banking into personal finance — an oversight capability that consumers rate very highly.

“They want the ability to understand and monitor their finances with something that doesn’t require much effort on their part except to buy into it,” he says.

Until that day comes, here are budgeting and bill-paying apps besides Mint that will make your financial life simpler:

LearnVest

This new app is an extension of the financial-planning site of the same name that’s been around since 2009, initially as a personal-finance education site for women.

The free app is a lot like Mint. It helps you create budgets and prioritize your financial goals while nudging you to meet them.

Like Mint, it also connects directly to all your accounts — savings, checking, credit cards, investments — and tracks every credit and debit.

That gives you an instant picture with easy-to-decipher charts and graphs of your net worth as well as alerts that you’re spending too much in one category.

There’s a lot of reading material to help you navigate your financial future and for an extra $19 a month, plus an initiation fee of as much as $399, you can get financial advice services.

HelloWallet

This app, which is owned by Morningstar, takes a behavioral science approach to business to help you plan your financial future, not just today’s bills and debt management.

Its founder, Matt Fellowes, is a consumer-finance scholar at the Brookings Institution who melded technology with behavioral psychology to offer individualized personal-finance recommendations based on income, age and spending patterns.

Using your GPS, for example, it can alert you that you already have spent too much money at a particular restaurant. It will also point out the gaps in your financial life, like a missing emergency-savings plan or inadequate levels of insurance.

It’s primarily distributed through employee wellness plans but household memberships are available — with a three-year commitment — for $100 annually.

OnBudget

This new app and its fee-free prepaid-card component follow an unfussy approach to budgeting: You can’t spend more than you have.

With a MasterCard prepaid debit card — what OnBudget calls a “monthly budgeting card” — you find yourself organizing spending much as your parents and grandparents may have, with different “envelopes” for each spending category.

But in this case it’s virtual envelope organizational behavior that delivers real-time spending patterns, tips on saving money and constructive suggestions for better decision-making.

There’s no setup involved because the software system learns your habits as you spend — and tells you about them. A plus: Unlike with most other personal-finance management tools, more than one person in a household can share a single budget.

And there’s no hiding spending here because the system tracks who is spending what.

Better Haves

Another envelope-budgeting system, this is a relatively new one designed particularly for couples, though individuals can use it too.

You can track expenses on the go and watch your color-coded envelopes deplete with each purchase.

Once the envelope’s empty, everyone is advised to stop spending in that category. This one’s dashboard charts joint expenses, but there are separate tabs for joint and individual budgets.

There’s even an early-warning system that a money fight could be in the offing. Plus it asks you how you felt about your spending that day.

According to the reviews, however, the app, which is free, still needs some tweaking with resetting budgets, adding more icons (or envelopes) and an apparent problem with crashing.

Check

This is the rare app that helps you stay on top of your bills and actually pay them from your smartphone. It touts itself as a “free app that does the worrying and work for you.”

Once you set it up, it sends reminders of due dates as it monitors your bank accounts and credit cards. It also alerts you in real-time of large purchases or unusual charges, but it won’t assist in budgeting.

This article originally appeared in Marketwatch.com.