5 Tools to Manage Your Money

 We’ve moved way beyond checkbook ledgers. Now you can manage budgets, pay down debts, and track investments from the comfort of … anywhere.

Credit Karma Mobile

This app not only lets you track your credit score—free of charge—it explains what the numbers mean, with helpful definitions of terms like credit card utilization rate and links to relevant articles and posts on Credit Karma’s website. And it will alert you when there are major changes to your credit report.
WIRED Charts turn credit-score management into a sort of game, but with real money.
TIRED Reports are from TransUnion only, rather than all three major credit reporting agencies.
Free iOS | Credit Karma Mobile

Mint.com Personal Finance

Mint attaches itself to your bank and credit accounts and automatically retrieves data, including deposits and purchases, rather than making you enter everything manually. Create as many budget lines as you want—food, clothing, transportation, etc.—and get alerts when you go over budget.
WIRED Track investments. Colored bars (green, yellow, red) for quick visual snapshot of each monthly budget line.
TIRED Annoying “advice” emails (you can opt out). Pie charts available only on tablet, no phone versions.
Free iOS | Free Android | Mint.com Personal Finance

Lemon Wallet

If you travel for business or are self-employed, you need this app. Snap photos of your receipts and Lemon extracts the relevant information—dates, vendors, and totals. The data and photo are available in app and on Lemon.com to make filing expense reports … well, less torturous. There’s also a Pro upgrade that offers line-item breakdowns and can save data to CSV files—handy for exporting to spreadsheets.
WIRED Stores PIN-protected photos of credit and loyalty cards.
TIRED Pro upgrade costs $10 a month.
Free iOS | Free Android | Lemon Wallet

HomeBudget With Sync

HomeBudget lets you share a budget with family members and sync between devices, with plenty of customization options to boot. You get full control over the naming and hierarchy of categories, and you can even upload your own icons to match.
WIRED Helpful reports and charts. Imports from OFX/QFX file formats and can export to CSV.
TIRED Unlike Mint, it makes you enter all nonrecurring transactions by hand, like an animal.
$4.99 iOS | $4.99 Android | HomeBudget With Sync

Debt Free

This app offers a variety of strategies for getting out of debt—like the debt snowball method, in which you focus on your smallest balance until that’s paid off, then apply that amount to the next smallest, and so on. It calculates your final payoff dates based on different strategies and reminds you when payments are due.
WIRED Pie charts and finance calculators give you a variety of perspectives on the hole you’re in.
TIRED No direct Dropbox support; backup is via email.
$1.99 iOS | Debt Free