BEST ANDROID APPS TO START OFF 2014 (Financial Apps)
By CSharpner · February 2, 2014
This article is one of a series of articles about the best Android apps available as of the beginning of 2014. Click here for the main article that includes links to this article and links to all the other categories of “The Best Of” apps for beginning 2014. This article is for the Financial apps category, which lists the best banking, debt, and financial apps available at the beginning of 2014. Most of these apps are free or very cheap.Google Wallet
NOTICE! Google Wallet used to be just for phones with NFC, and was also blocked by many carriers and wouldn’t install on many phones. Google has significantly changed what Google Wallet is now. Now, it is your Google money account. With it you have access to transactions from the Google Play store (apps, music, movies, books, etc…). You can also send money to friend through it, as well as make NFC payments at your local retailers (even make local purchases WITHOUT NFC!). Google Wallet now works on just about any phone on just about any carrier.
If you enable location services (let it see your GPS), then it can notify you of nearby deals.
Debt Payoff Planner ($0.99)
Debt Payoff Planner lets you enter all of your debts, their interest rates, minimum payments due on each, what you can afford each month towards paying off debt, and it will show you the best way to pay down those debts to get it paid off the earliest, paying the least amount in interest.
It will produce payoff tables, showing you each debut, how much to apply to it, on what days. It’s very simple to use and doesn’t require you to understand the complexities of compound interest or anything like that. All you need to know is how much you owe on each, what their interest rates are, their minimum payments, and how much you can afford to apply towards your debts each month. It does all the complex work for you and shows you simple payment plans.
aCar (free & paid)
aCar keeps track of your auto expenses, including fuel costs, repair and service records and costs, and can show you where you’re spending the most and will even calculate your mileage that you’re getting. There’s both a free version and a paid version that gives you some nice graphs and reports.
Each time you fill up, enter the number of gallons you purchased, your total price (or price/gallon) and your current mileage. It’ll figure out the rest.
This does take due diligence on your part to stay current and enter it every time.
adSense Dashboard (free)
Do you use Google ads for a side income on your websites and blogs (or perhaps your own apps)? adSense Dashboard shows you your earnings in a nice, clean dashboard UI.
You can also choose views for:
- Overview (the dashboard)
- Sites
- Custom Channels
- URL channels
- Ad units
- Graphs
- Reports
Google AdSense (Free)
Much like adSense Dashboard, Google’s AdSense provides you a different kind of view of your Google ad income. Of course, it looks more like the Google Now Cards interface.
Google’s version also has notifications, much like the notification drop down in their Google+ mobile app, so if there are any notifications on your account, you can see them from the bell menu.
Quicken 2013 and Quicken 2014
If you use Quicken on your desktop, then you have access to the free, mobile app. Though the mobile app is free, the desktop app (required) is not free. There’s a version for Quicken 2013 and one for Quicken 2014. From inside your desktop application, you have it sync with your Quicken Cloud account, then on your mobile device, you log into your cloud account and you can view all your accounts from your mobile. Additionally, you can finally enter transactions directly from your mobile device. This has created a new level of convenience in the Quicken software. You can enter your transactions at the time you write your checks, rather than downloading them and going through your checkbook register to validate.
Just be aware of the MANY bugs in Quicken software!
Financial Calculators (Free)
Financial Calculators is a free app, and despite the pluralness of the name, it’s a single app, but it does have multiple calculators in it.
Most (if not all) of the many calculators in this app provide multiple fields for you to enter. You can leave some out and it will auto-calculate the values of the others (provided you gave it enough information).
Rather than explain each calculator in this app (there are MANY), here’s a screen shot of the top of the list (there are more):
Your Bank’s mobile apps
Of course, I can’t provide a review of every single bank’s and credit card company’s apps. Instead, I’ll explain what you can expect from most of them in 2014: For bank apps, you should have access to your checking transactions. You should also have the ability to make deposits from home (or anywhere) via your mobile app. You simply sign the back of the check you received, then use your bank’s app to take photos of the front and the back, then tell the mobile app how much the check is. The app will do OCR on the routing number and account number of the check, then make those funds immediately available to you. No more rushing to the bank during their highly useless hours (openning an hour or to after you go to work, and closing an hour before you leave work).
Conclusion:
This is just a small fraction of what’s available as far as financial apps are concerned. Search the Google Play store for your own bank’s or credit card’s apps. They can be quite convenient.
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