The Best Financial Apps for College Students
Top 5 Best Finance Apps for College Students for 2021
finance apps are pretty hit or miss but the good ones can change your, life they can change the way you save spend and invest your money which all contribute to your ultimate financial freedom there's five finance apps that i'm a big fan of and in this article i'm gonna show you all five of them
let's get started !!
1- Mint :
what makes it so great is how clean the design is it's so aesthetically pleasing that it's no surprise a lot of people have fallen in love with this free app
budgeting is so important in college as a student once you have a better idea of where your money's going you'll have a higher appreciation for the dollar and there's a psychological shift even if it happens without you realizing it or you start having tighter control of where your money goes and you start saving more money mint offers a lot of other free features which i'm not going to discuss because i think the most of their value is in the budgeting part of the app but what's really nice is that you can link all your loads investments and savings into the app so it's kind of a one-stop shop for you .
2- Robinhood:
if you haven't heard of robinhood you're probably living underneath the rock because robin hood is everywhere and they have changed the very nature of retail investing they were the first to offer trades with no commissions and since they did that that's basically become the norm in the brokerage world but they were the first and they effectively democratized what it means to invest in the stock market it used to be really hard for college students to get in and invest their money quickly but robinhood has made that very intuitive especially with their design .
if you go to their app you'll see just how easy it is to understand what's going on and what news is relevant to each stock and the overall industry they also offer cash management which i've never experimented with and frankly i think that's not where the value of the app lies but overall it's a great app to be introduced in the stock market to start building intuition and if you want to get a little bit more advanced they also offer trading options on their app which some people have gotten into it can be really fun and very educational.
3- Boro:
i really believe in what they do they're the only app on this list that's designed specifically for college students and they offer incredible budgeting features on the app for you to tie your bank accounts to and see where you're spending your money it's designed specifically for college students and they also offer loads so they offer cash loads in the case of emergencies and also borrow drive offers loans in case you want to buy a car on campus .
what's really powerful about these loads is they have the opportunity to increase your credit score which is really important to buying a house after you graduate they also offer credit analysis so showing you what your credit is its strategies for improving it .
but my favorite part of the app comes in their analysis of your spending habits they effectively offer personas at the end of every week that compare you to your spending habits and who that means you are whether it's a party animal or something else what i really like is that they compare your spending habits to college students nationwide so you can see how you stack up to what an average college student in the us is and also what a college student at your college is so they show you what your spending habits and budgeting looks like compared to peers in your immediate geographic area which is incredible and it's something i've never seen done.
4- Weeble:
and weeble is effectively robinhood on steroids so where as robinhood is retail investing for beginners weeble is retail investing but for the more advanced investors so whereas investing in norwegian cruise lines would look like this on robin hood on weeble it looks something more like this it's a lot more data heavy and a lot of your decisions are going to be backed in much more financial research and reports so whereas you get one free stock when you invest in robinhood .
you do get three free apps when you download weeble which is a great value for anyone getting it even if you just want to try it out and then cash out which is what i did.
5- Acorns :
and you've probably seen a ton of ashley kutcher ads on instagram or snapchat about this but it really is a great app they truly encourage healthy investment strategy and they don't let you invest in any individual app on their service they only let you invest in etfs and indexes which i think is great we should really be staying diversified as 20 year olds and that's how our strategy should be focused.
but what they do is round up your latest purchase on a debit or credit card to the nearest dollar and they tuck that away for you which is effectively an acorn an analogy they do not hesitate to use often what's really nice about this is that it's so automated you can set it up and really stop worrying about it but one downside is that it's the only app on this list which actually charges you money to use there's a one three and five dollar monthly plan the five dollar plan is really focused on investing for your children the one dollar plan only offers reoccurring investment and roundup investing to the nearest dollar in etfs or indexes whereas the three dollar plan is where the most value comes in that's where they really let you invest in actual roth iras they also provide a variety of either credit and financial services that's all on acorn