LearnVest
Price: Free
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, Android
Overview:
LearnVest began as an educational website on personal finance for women, but has since become a popular financial budgeting app for men and women alike. Like Mint, LearnVest tracks your spending and income and shows trends over time, which helps you create personal budgets to manage your money. Also like Mint, LearnVest has no permission to touch your money, but can only show information about it in real-time. LearnVest has the same tools for budgeting money and tracking expenses, but also features information to help users improve their financial literacy. The app is simpler and offers fewer features than Mint, but provides more reading material for its users.
Like Mint, LearnVest automatically categorizes transactions and allows you to correct and classify uncategorized transactions, but doesn’t learn from its mistakes. It’s a little irritating to correct the same errors over and over again manually, but it’s a small downside for a nice app. LearnVest also lets you divide any transaction – say you went to a Las Vegas casino and bought a hotel room for four nights, and you also lost money on the gambling floor, for a total of $1000. You can split the transaction, putting $800 under “travel expenses,” and $200 under your “gambling” budget. And, like Mint, you can categorize money that you withdraw from the ATM and spend. If you withdraw $50 to spend on an extra-large margarita by the casino’s pool during the day and the slots at night, you can categorize the ATM cash transaction into two separate categories.
LearnVest is free to download and use to track transactions and create budgets, but the app also offers a number of paid features, like access to classes, articles, and even online events for personal finance education. Their biggest paid feature can connect you with a financial planner who helps create your online profile and can discuss the details of your financial matters. However, the price for this and other features is heavy – $19 a month, plus a $299 initiation fee. The financial planners do not manage assets, trades, or investments, but can work with you to determine strategies for growing and saving your money.
Bottom line:
If you don’t like Mint, the next best thing is the free version of LearnVest. Although it offers fewer standard features, it’s a breeze to use and has most of the stuff that Mint offers, along with educational material. And if you’re in the market for a financial planner, LearnVest is the way to go.
