Tag: Mint »

The new year is a time for forming better habits, but it’s not always easy. The year is still young, but our motivation to start the year off right fades quickly.

If you’ve resolved to spend smarter this year, luckily there are a range of excellent apps to help you stay focused. We’ve sifted through the top budget apps to bring you our favorites to ensure a fiscally fit 2016.

The best

Mint is a great all-in-one money management app. Developed by Intuit, the people who also produce TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Quicken, Mint pairs up with your bank accounts to track your spending and saving automatically. If you make an old-fashioned cash purchase, you can input the transaction manually with ease. What’s more, Mint also tracks your credit card debt and monitors your credit score. The app also features a colorful, simple design that’s easy on the eyes, making the budgeting process a little less painful.

The rest

Spending Tracker is a trusty little app that takes a simplistic approach to budgeting. Enter your income for the month, and a “budget bar” appears at the top of the main screen. As you record your spending for the month, the bar will slowly drop into the red. Rotating the screen horizontally presents a handy pie chart that shows how much spending goes into each category in a month. You can also view your cash flow over an extended period of time in a convenient line graph.

Coinkeeper makes budgeting fast, and, dare I say fun? Input your income and bank account balances. You can then set your budget according to the categories (groceries, eating outside, etc.) listed or ask the app to do it for you. Whenever you make a purchase, your budget coins will slowly fill up, giving you a visual representation of how you’re doing as the month progresses.

Do you have a go-to budgeting app? Let us know in the comments below!

Hey, there are over a billion apps out there, you know? There are only a few featured each week by the App Store, only a tiny fraction make the top paid and free charts, and fewer still are included in Apple's Essentials collections.

What that means is that there are a ton of great apps and games out there that just don't get discovered. Let's remedy that, at least a little bit, with our choices for ten of the most underrated apps on the App Store.

Bird Zapper - Here's one of the more ridiculous match-three offerings out there, with a solidly pleasant presentations, control set, and game mechanics. If you're up for some wacky bird torture and like the zen-like state of mindful repetition, this one's for you.

Epic Win - You know what's boring? To-Do lists. Even worse? Completing them. Chores suck, but Epic Win turns them into a game, offering you experience points and level ups to keep you interested and motivated. I still rock this app on my iPhone.

Hard Lines - Take two time-honored video game genres, the dual stick arcade shooter and Snake, and mash them up. You'll get something like Hard Lines, one of the stickier games out there, one in which the resulting app is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Blocks Cometh - This retro-flavored platformer/jumper should have made a longer lasting splash, what with its look, sound, and solid controls. Regardless, it's a game that you should grab for your iOS device right now; it's that good.

Match Panic - Originally titled Critter Panic, this match three game has it all: pixelly artwork, retro chiptune soundtrack, and the addictive nature of time-based pattern matching. Get ready to bliss out with your iPhone and a set of headphones when you play this fantastic game.

Mint - Honestly, I don't know how I lived or did taxes before Mint, the mobile app version of the award-winning financial web service. I find it surprising, though, how few people know of the service or the app. I'm here to right that wrong, now, by recommending you give it a try.

CardMunch - This LinkedIn-sponsored business card scanning app is probably the best of the ones I've used, but I doubt you've even heard of it. Eclipsed by apps like Evernote Hello, CardMunch seems to do a better job recognizing funky card designs. It also connects right to LinkedIn, which makes a lot of sense for those of us that rely on that for business contacts.

Camera+ - Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time replacing Apple's built-in apps with third-party ones. Part of it is the inability to set other apps as default, and part of it is that Apple's apps work well, and simply. Camera+ is one of the exceptions, as it does so much more to take iPhone photography to the next level. Seriously, get this app.

Knights of Pen & Paper - If you're a closet Dungeons & Dragons fan, you'll already warm to the alliterative title of this smart, tongue-in-cheek homage to fantasy role playing of the analog sort. My kids and I pass the iPad back and forth with this game all the time, even to this day.

Rdio - Poor Rdio, it never gets much love. When I see streaming music mentioned in any type of press, it's always Pandora and Spotify that are mentioned. Rdio is a brilliant internet radio platform, organized more by album for us older music lovers. It's got a great catalog of both popular and more indie music, and just gets better each day. Give it a try for free and see if it works for your brain.