If you are serious about getting your finances in order, the best place to start is your budget. A budgeting tool can help you plan ahead, track your expenses, and keep you on track to achieving your goals.
One problem is that a quick search on the internet for budgeting apps will bring up hundreds of choices. How can you choose the best budgeting app when there are so many options?
Mint and Simplifi are two of most popular budgeting apps. Although each app offers everything you need to achieve your financial goals there are important differences. We'll give you a brief overview of each budgeting app and discuss the differences to help you decide which one is best for you.
What is Simplifi?
Quicken created Simplifi, a budgeting tool. Although Quicken was a well-known budgeting app for many decades, it couldn't compete with Mint or other digital budgeting apps. To appeal to younger customers, Simplifi was created to offer a seamless digital budgeting experience.
Simplifi makes it simple to connect your financial accounts, create a personalized spending plan and track your spending throughout each month. You can track your savings and gain powerful insight into your financial habits.
Simplifi's best features include:
- Financial dashboard. Simplifi’s dashboard gives you a complete overview of your finances. It includes your account balances and transactions. You can also see your top spending categories.
- Spending Plan: Simplifi uses your monthly income to create your spending plan. It subtracts your monthly bills and customizes your spending plan.
- Savings goals Simplifi lets you set savings goals and calculate how much each month you want to save. You can also track your progress as you go.
- Reports and insight: Simplifi’s reports feature lets you see any information you need about your finances, even customized reports.
- Investment tracking You can connect all your investments accounts to view all of them in one place, and track their growth.
- Projected Cash Flows:Simplifi will show you the projected cash flow for the next month based on your account balances, and upcoming bills.
- Watchlists You can select specific spending categories from Simplifi to monitor outside of your regular spending plan.
What is mint?
Mint is a budgeting app that you have probably heard of if you have done research on them in the past. Mint, which is owned by Intuit is one of the most widely used budgeting apps. According to Mint's website, it is used by more than 30,000,000 people and is the most downloaded personal finance app.
Mint, like Simplifi makes it simple to connect your bank accounts and create a budget. You can also track your spending every month. Mint also offers many other unique features, such as subscription management and credit score tracking.
These are just a few of the best features of Mint:
- Create a custom budget: Mint, like Simplifi allows you to set up a budget plan and track your spending throughout the month.
- Financial goalsMint lets you set financial goals and track your progress.
- Bill tracker With Mint's bill tracking, you will be notified when your bills are due. You'll also be notified if the price has increased and any additional fees.
- Subscription management.Mint allows you to view all subscriptions and catch any that aren't necessary. You can cancel or remove them from your budget.
- Bill negotiationMint's partnership to Billshark allows you to have your bills negotiated without having to do any work.
- Credit score trackingMint allows you to see your credit score and alerts you when there are any changes.
- Investment tracking You can connect your Mint account with all your investment accounts to track their growth and identify hidden fees.
- Net Worth tracking: If you connect your financial and debt accounts, it'll allow you to track your net worth over time and see how it changes.
Simplifi vs. Mint: Which one is right for you?
As you can see, Mint and Simplifi share many things. We'll explain their differences in the following sections so that you can choose which one is best for you.
Cost
Mint's popularity is due to the fact that Mint is free to use. You can upgrade to a premium package, but almost all features are available on the free plan. Premium plans can be upgraded for $4.99 per month. This includes ad removal, subscription cancellation and advanced data visualization.
Simplifi requires a subscription in order to be used. You have the option to pay either $5.99 per month, or $47.88 annually. You can save 33% with the annual plan. Both the annual and monthly plans include a 30-day free trial.
Budgeting
Both Mint and Simplifi have a primary function: budgeting. Both services excel at it. The process is similar for both apps: you connect your bank accounts, create a budget and track your spending throughout the month.
The two apps use slightly different approaches. Mint allows you to look at your entire budget. This tool will show you how your spending is tracking for each category and for the entire budget. You can transfer money that is left over in any category to the next month. This is especially useful if you have a fluctuating spending pattern.
Simplifi, like Mint shows you how much money you still have in your spending plan. You can also add planned expenditure. You can also add planned spending to your budget.
Simplifi's unique feature is the ability to monitor only certain budget categories, rather than all. You can add certain spending categories to your watchlist that you are more likely to spend above budget.
Investment tracking
Mint and Simplifi both allow you to link your investment accounts to track their growth as well as your net worth (assuming that you have also connected your debt accounts).
Mint's investment tracker tool will allow you to view all your investments, their current value, as well as how they have changed over time. Mint will also look out for hidden fees that could reduce your investment returns.
Simplifi's mobile app allows you to connect investment accounts and track their growth. It is possible to connect third-party accounts and manually add private investments. A personalized news feed will be created for your investments and you'll receive updated prices. Simplifi will also show you key indicators, calculations and other information to help you monitor your performance.
Reporting
Simplifi and Mint both offer reporting tools that enable you to view various aspects of your personal financial situation.
Mint reports can show line graphs that chart your money over time. This includes your net worth, spending and investments. Mint Premium will give you more powerful reporting tools such as predictive spending projections, spending graphs, and the ability to compare your spending habits with other users.
Simplifi has the advantage in reporting simply because there are so many options. There are many report categories, including income, spending, net income and savings. You can also see your monthly summary. You can create custom reports for each category by using different dates, breakdowns and other filters.
Mobile User Experience
Simplifi and Mint are both designed to be used in mobile apps. It's not surprising that both Mint and Simplifi have visually appealing apps to help manage your money.
Mint's mobile app has a clear advantage. It is rated 4.8 out 5 stars by the Apple App Store with over 745,600 reviews. It also receives a rating of 4.4.4 stars in Google Play Store with over 202,000 reviews.
Simplifi has a rating in the Apple App Store of 4.1 stars with approximately 1,300 ratings. Simplifi's rating in the Google Play Store is 3.2 out 5 stars, with just 962 ratings.
Security
It is important to ensure that your financial accounts are secure whenever you give access to third-party services. Simplifi and Mint are both owned by large financial institutions with a history of being in the financial industry. Customers can expect both Mint and Simplifi to have top-notch security features.
Mint employs security scanning, multifactor authentication and other methods to protect your account. To ensure the security of sensitive data transfers, Mint participates in security scans with VeriSign. Mint encourages customers to use strong passwords to protect their accounts and to set up multifactor authentication. Mint also uses bank-level encryption to allow read-only access.
Simplifi takes security very seriously. Secure 256-bit encryption is used by Simplifi to securely transfer data from your bank servers. This encryption method is considered one of the most secure. It encourages multi-factor authentication, which is required by many financial institutions when you link your accounts.
Our Take
Mint and Simplifi have been two of the most favored budgeting apps. Mint has a more extensive history and is more popular than Simplifi, but it also offers many other benefits. After reading this comparison, if you are still not sure which app is best for you, you can take advantage of Simplifi’s 30-day free trial to try both apps and decide which one is best for you.
The author is not a client at Personal Capital Advisors Corporation. He is paid as a freelancer.
This blog post contains general information and is not intended to be legal, tax, or accounting advice. No compensation exceeding $500. For your particular situation, you should speak to a qualified tax or legal professional. Remember that investing comes with risk. Your investment's value will fluctuate over time. You may lose or gain money. Personal Capital Advisors Corporation is a subsidiary owned by Personal Capital. Any reference to advisory services means that Personal Capital Advisors Corporation is referring to them. Personal Capital Advisors Corporation (SEC) is an investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The registration does not imply any specific skill or training and does not mean that the SEC endorses them. The analysis is done at the time of publication. Information may change over time. Please visit each company's site for current information. August 2022.
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By: Erin Gobler
Title: Simplifi vs. Mint: What’s the Difference?
Sourced From: www.personalcapital.com/blog/whitepapers/simplifi-vs-mint/
Published Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 00:28:15 +0000
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