We all know that Budgeting Sucks and that being productive and achieving your goals outside of work can be a bit of a drag when you have such little free time, so I have assembled a few iPhone Apps that will hopefully help make life a little easier for you. Best of all they are FREE!
In no particular order, here they are:
Money Strands is my alternative to Mint.com and allows users to automatically sync their online bank accounts for tracking, budgeting and spending. For those people who don’t feel comfortable providing automatic access to their bank accounts, you can also create manual accounts. This is perfect for anyone not living in the USA as you can’t automatically sync your accounts anyway.
Most banks will let you export your transactions from their website into a suitable file format, which you can then import into MoneyStrands. Set all this up on their web-based site, then get access to it all on your mobile. MoneyStrands is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad OS 3.0 or later.
If you don’t want the online integration and you’re happy to input some figures by hand on your mobile then Jumsoft Money may be for you. This is a pretty straight forward application, available on the iPhone OS 3.0 and iPad platforms. It has everything you need to keep track of your financial transactions, create budgets and view some colourful stats. You can set up Alerts for bills, have multiple accounts and access some pretty powerful analysis all on your phone, but if you really feel you need to see it on a desk top, you can sync to your home computer as well.
This is one of the best free personal finance apps I have seen. Make sure you download this one and give it a shot!
You may have already heard of Evernote and even tried it out, but my alternative is Catch Notes. Originally know as 3Banana, Catch Notes is a free feature-packed notepad app that allows you to capture text, images, and locations with free sync and backups to Catch.com. You can Password protect your notes, share them and assign #tags so they are easy to find.
This is a productivity app and is really handy for making notes and reminders on the go, so you can go back to them later for use. Catch Notes is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad OS 3.1.0 or later and is definitely worth a look if you need help getting organised.
BONUS: If Catch Notes sounds a bit heavy and you want something really simple, but just as effective, try Simplenote instead.
TeamViewer is already used on more than 100,000,000 computers worldwide and provides easy, fast and secure remote access to PCs and Macs. This is a really cool service that is now available as an app for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Ever needed a document or some info that you left on your computer at home? This app lets you access to your own computer with all of its documents and installed applications!
This app has a ton of features and best of all the free version of TeamViewer has exactly the same features as the Pro version (TeamViewer is free for personal use, i.e. use TeamViewer completely free of charge to access your private computers or to help your friends with their computer problems).
Who doesn’t like Google? Most people use it everyday on their computer, so why not get it on your iPhone? Google Mobile App will let you search Google quickly using your voice, pictures, or location.
Check out some of the features:
- Goggle recognizes pictures of things such as landmarks, books, wine, artwork, and logos.
- Speak your queries in natural language. Simply hold your iPhone to your ear and say your query. (Supports American, British, Indian or Australian English accents, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish and Korean.)
- Google Suggest – tap suggested web search queries and local businesses that appear as you type
Google Mobile App also links to Google’s other applications so that you can easily navigate to them, so take a look and see what you think.
Do you sometimes feel that it is just too hard to type in all you notes and reminders? Never fear, Dragon Dictation is here! This is an easy-to-use voice recognition application that allows you to speak and instantly see your text or email messages.
If you are the Mayor of Lazy Town, Dragon Dictation will even let you dictate status updates directly to your Social Networking applications (Facebook and Twitter) or send notes and reminders to yourself….all using your voice.
Dragon Dictation currently supports U.S. English, U.K. English, German, French and Italian. This app requires a Dropbox account. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, the app will allow you to create one for free.
Hope you find something useful here to help make life a little easier!