Income Trackers: Keep a Good Eye on Your Disposable Income In 2022!

Personal budget management works so much better in 2022 with income trackers. This type of apps & software come in handy if compared to so-to-speak an “envelope” budgeting method. Never heard of the envelope approach? That’s when people manage their household budget by splitting income into different envelopes and call it “budget management”. Then they’d enclose a certain amount of cash in each one of the envelopes to control spending. Sounds a bit outdated. Don’t you think so?

Today, income tracking apps are a boon especially amongst consumers. They allow monitoring and keep a good eye on where the money goes. The whole purpose of money tracking apps is awesome because they can easily and with no hassle keep a good track of personal income. These apps will handle your personal taxes, catalog receipts, and monitor overall budget in accordance to earnings. 

Mobile income trackers are useful everywhere: office work, fashion blog, creative business, school, etc. Some would let you even doodle and brainstorm whatever comes to mind – from ideas, plans, schedules to random thoughts. Why not take advantage of them?

In this blog post, we’ll talk about why/ how to keep track of expenses and manage a personal income. Also, we’ll talk about the most popular income trackers for 2022. Let’s jump right into it!

What are the easiest ways to keep track of money in 2022?

Doing a good job at managing personal income becomes even more vital since life keeps challenging us in 2022. So, the right income tracker can make the difference and make income monitoring a lot easier. Certainly, you can spend weeks researching or analyzing users’ opinions/reviews, going through a bunch of video tutorials, scrutinizing features of every app you run into, etc. In reality, here’s 3 aspects to consider and pay attention to: cost, limitations, and usability, of course.

Where to start? First, identify expenses, as well as their periodicity, make special note of any business travels, note your expenses as they occur. And stay on top of current receipts. Then you can divide your most common expenditures according to how often you’ve to pay. In other words, outline and create a well-structured list.

Below is a quick rundown of the most common expenses everybody has at some point.

Monthly expenses:

• Mortgage/Rent
• Utilities
• Groceries
• Emergency savings (gifts, donations, eating out, repairs, etc.)
• Retirement contributions
• Phone, mobile connection, cable TV, Internet
• Vacations savings
• Entertainment

Quarterly expenses:

• Sewer bill

6-month expenses:

• Auto insurance
• Health insurance

Annual expenses:

• Property Taxes
• Homeowners/Renter’s Insurance

If the term “budget monitoring” still sounds pretty intimidating to you, here are 3 easy step how to begin and then move ahead:

Step 1. Create your personal budget. This is important because that’s one of the most effective ways to figure out how your money is being used every week and every month. Actually, any expenses can be tracked easily if you’ll monitor the way you behave with payments. For instance, good chances are that you’d go over the daily budget and spend more on weekends. Well, just because you’ve got more stuff going on. Or tend to order food just because of not feeling well or don’t have time for cooking.

Step 2. Do weekly check–ins. Try to track your expenses every week rather than once a month. That way you’ll fully understand what areas you’ve spent more money on and where less. Eventually, you’ll be able to visualize where you can cut your expenditures down. Also, in what particular areas you can reduce useless spending.

Step 3. Find a spending tracker. Once you’ve created a necessary personal budget and have a more clear idea on how to plan it, go ahead and let the income tracker keep records of your expenditures. In fact, you’ll find lots of income trackers out there that we’ll guide you to many conventional ways of spending money.

What are the main benefits of income tracking apps?

Whenever it comes down to tracking money, it goes both ways, inflow and outflow. With the digital world, it is becoming a lot easier now to control your personal budget because all your online transactions get automatically accounted for. For example, you will be able to do manual entries in the app for cash transactions easily and timely.  

Obvious benefits of mobile income trackers:

• Keep track of your spending any time/anywhere on your mobile device (unlike scrabbling some paper notes)
• Store data securely with unlimited access on any mobile device.
• Have clear & transparent reports without having to calculate how much you’ve earned and spent every week/month.
• Connect to online banking and receive SMS notifications every time you make a transaction.
•  Good budgeting will let you finally move ahead on your savings.

There are several daily expense tracker apps available on Play Store today. So, if you’ve got a smartphone, these apps let you take your credit card(s) info and put it in the app as well. Also, you will be able to scan items the same way as they are scanned at checkout by cashiers. Basically, every time you’re doing your monthly accounting or report spending for personal taxes, all your transactions will be right there at your fingertips.

However, if all of this is not required because you’re just trying to track whether or not money is leaving your account, then try the Budget Tracker & Planner, for instance. You’ll get aggregated percentage breakdowns on how much each category was used during a given timeframe (weekly or monthly). It’s like having a smart mentor who is monitoring all expenses and managing them very effectively. Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you’re going to stay on top of your finances and finally reach your goals.

The truth is that financial lessons don’t have to be learned the hard way. So, you can start using income trackers to net-net, pay bills, save, etc. In other words, do all you can to stay afloat even if times are tough.

Spending tracker apps users like in 2022

In reality, there’re a whole bunch of income tracker mobile apps available today for expense management. If you search on Google then you’ll find thousands of results. Here are some of most popular budget trackers for smartphone users for 2022:

• Mint
• Pocket Expense 6
• Wally
• Expensify
• Spendee Budget
• Pocket Guard
• Money Lover
• Personal Capital
• Xpense

In fact, there’re lots of reliable apps on the market today that will help you create a realistic budget, automatically put money into savings accounts for you, and help you get rid of unnecessary temptations. Income tracker apps are good at sending alerts to let you know when you’re getting close to exceeding the current budget or falling short on savings goals.

If you’re a business owner who wants to get one for the iPhone, you can try the Moon Invoice app. It will help you track your accounts easily. For example, you can set your budget for a particular project to get a clear idea of how much money is in your savings. it’s a good way not to go over the budget and reach your business goals.

What do spending trackers offer to users?

Most expense tracking apps can clearly show what’s going on with your budget so that you’ll have a clear picture of how much money you can save up or put aside. If you’re trying to set up a custom budget, the money tracker app will provide you a clear view on how much money you can spend on a particular project. You can easily install mobile budget tracker apps on iPhone, Mac, Windows, or Android. 

Some useful features of these apps:

• Get your payments reports
• Keep an eye on online invoicing
• Take advantage of online billing
• Use auto recurring invoices
• Set up automatic reminders for late payments
• Use already made invoice templates to create invoices
• Set your daily/weekly/monthly budget to manage expenses
• Create your own custom categories or edit the existing categories
• Generate spending charts to learn about your expenses within a certain period.
• Access info about your spending for a particular category.
• Transfer info about your spending in either particular categories or the whole monthly record to excel/csv files.

In case you’re worried about how secure your financial data is going to be, look at these tips that provide an additional help to keep you away from troubles:

Get a sense of what the field app is. For example, respondents say that they will not use an app that stores their bank credentials about a quarter percent. However, the reality may be different. So be aware of the data aggregators that can pull your bank info into the app and then they can often sign in on your behalf in your bank account when you have your credentials.

Read before signing up for the fin–tech app. How often do you actually read disclosures? Never? Shhh. However, this can help you fully understand your rights and responsibilities.

Find out which apps on your phone are able to access your bank data. So, pick up your phone and let’s see how many apps you’ve got: Do you use all of them, really? Or do the majority of them just kind of sit there? Consider what apps can be removed from your smartphone. Also, your bank may have enabled such a feature through its portal. So, also check there.

Get in the habit of updating your bank passwords. It’s easy to forget about an application that still has access to your bank data. So, cut off access by resetting your bank password(s). And yes, you’ll need to update the apps with new login information. However, this hassle is worth it and reduces unnecessary risks.

Bottom-line

If you have a smartphone, the easiest thing is to download an app and start tracking every expense. Every time you either spend cash or use a debit/credit card – your budget tracker will record everything. Most decent apps will also allow you to input a budget and categorize your spending as well. You need to do this so that you know exactly how much and where you are spending your money.

Depending on how much is “left over” you may want to save more aggressively for an earlier retirement or look at investing towards building wealth, or you may find that it’s the money you spend on experiences with family and friends that keep you happy. But if you’ve got some extra money, why not use part of it to empower yourself? Be smart and use your extra money to learn. Go and take the course or two to add more value to your career!