We live in a world where technology is so advanced that everything can be accessible in the palm of our hands. As long as you have a smartphone, you can be updated on your friend’s latest status, the world’s latest news, play games, watch videos & many more. Depending on how you use it, it can be your best friend or it can also be your enemy. If you look through your phone app right now, what are the apps that are most accessible to you, or what are the apps that are on your front page? For me, it is social media app followed by all my top personal finance & investment apps. One of the apps that I avoid putting on my phones is gaming apps as I find them to be addictive & a waste of my time.
As for personal finance & investment apps, I find them to be extremely useful for me in my daily life especially to check on my financial health, status & also for spending purposes. Below are the apps that I am using based on the importance & also the frequency of my usage.
1. Money Manager With the discipline that I have to record every single expense of mine from the smallest to the biggest amount, this app is extremely useful for me as I am tracking my expenses at a micro-level. I believe my expenses accuracy is at 95% or more. Aside from tracking my expenses, I am using it to track my wealth where all my investments, credit card, & bank balances are closely linked with my money manager apps.
One of the many things I like about this app is, that they have auto-backup where it will be synced for you based on the operating system. Just in case you lost your phone or upgrade your phone, high chance that those data will be still available for you to restore. If you are transferring from iPhone to Android or vice versa, you may not be able to restore the old data. I’ve been using this app for over 5 years but due to my phone upgrade from Android to iPhone, I lost my previous data but, with my consistency in using the app, I can trace my spending & wealth since 2017.
2. Bank Mobile App Mobile or online banking wasn’t really my thing initially when it was first launched. I don’t remember when, but during those times, I would rather drive to the bank to do a money transfer than complete the transfer online. Of course, times have changed & mobile banking is definitely beneficial for all of us. Not only you can check your online balance, transfer money & pay your loan, but you can also track your credit card expenses. I personally track my credit card expenses closely & link them back to my money manager app.
3. E-Wallet AppCash or e-wallet? Personally, I prefer using e-wallets over cash any day. Usually, I don’t have much cash in my wallet & I only withdraw cash every 2-3 weeks depending on my cash spending. What I like about e-wallets is the convenience of it & some e-wallets such as GrabPay offer amazing perks such as GrabPoints where you can use the points to redeem discounts or gift cards. As for now, I am a heavy GrabPay user followed by Touch&Go.
4. Investment App I have multiple investment apps on my phone but as for my active ones, I have iSpeed.my (Rakuten Trade), FSM Mobile, FundingSocieties, Fundaztic, HelloGold & Raiz. Those are the apps that I do log in to check every 1-2 weeks.
5. EPF App
I don’t visit this app as frequently as all of the above apps mentioned, but I do check out my EPF balance every few months to view my EPF balance. My EPF amount is the only savings that I do not link to my Money Manager app since it is an amount that I won’t be able to withdraw until I am 55 years old therefore, I have decided to not link it up. As for the rest, it is all 100% linked to my money manager app.
Bonus: Phone Calculator I have 2 different phone calculators that I am using currently. First is the in-app calculator which is quite useful for me & also a calculator app where I can calculate other features such as compounding interest, loan calculator, ROI calculator & many others.
Conclusion:
The above apps are the ones that I can’t live without based on the sequence. As mentioned earlier, it is based on the frequency of my usage. For me, all those apps are co-related to each other & I definitely can’t live without any of them. I can’t stress enough the importance of having an app or a spreadsheet to track your expenses. It can be extra work for you to track it but it can also help you to track where all your expenses go. With that data, you can easily plan your finances better.
OSS!
You can also check out my latest YouTube video on How To Invest Like Warren Buffett:
