A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.
– John C. Maxwell
From putting your first-ever allowance in a piggy bank at age five to opening a savings account when you’re 18, these practices help you track how much money you have based on what you put in.
But what about the money that goes out? This is where budgeting comes in — helping you experience the best of both worlds by recording and tracking both your savings and expenses to align with your personal finance goals at every stage of life.
Depending on your budgeting preferences and budgeting goals, you can utilize the following budgeting tools available in Canada to help you monitor, manage and organize your monthly, quarterly and yearly financial records.
360-degree View Of Your Financial Life — Neontra
Overview: Neontra is a Canadian-based and effective financial tool to manage your personal finances. It enables users to keep track of all their assets, investments, banking, and even debts through a wide range of features.
Basic budgeting: With a user-friendly interface, it’s easy to create a personalized budget planner and tracker with Neontra. It helps you to analyze your spending behaviour through a multi-period lens and effectively breaks down how your money is used for utilities, mortgage, education and shopping, for instance.
Beyond budgeting: It predicts your financial future using the forecasts feature to give you an estimation of when to retire based on your savings and spendings, and when will you be debt-free in terms of specific timelines (5, 10, or 25 years from now).
Flexible and versatile: Users can easily manage, import, and sync their previous data to Neontra. They can also keep their banks or brokers anonymous.
Pricing: Users can enjoy a 35-day free trial. After the trial period, users can either opt for a free plan or a premium plan. Monthly package: $9 USD/month, Yearly package: $75 USD/year.
Clarity Guaranteed & Collaboration-Friendly — Monarch Money Canada
Overview: Monarch Money is a powerful financial management app that’s designed with financial solutions in mind. Users can easily track their finances on any mobile device with detailed and engaging visual aids featuring Monarch Sankey’s Diagram.
Basic budgeting: From tracking and recording incomes, and expenses in different categories, Monarch Money allows users to take the lead when it comes to planning for big expenses annually or anticipating different scenarios. For instance, how would a purchase of a new car influence your personal finances in the long term.
Beyond budgeting: Monarch stands out with its collaboration features, especially among couples, family members and even the users’ financial advisors. Collaborators will be given separate login details to collaborate without any additional costs.
Customization and clarity: Monarch’s Money dashboard allows users to focus on what matters to them — net worth, transactions, budget goals, and spending habits all in one glance.
Pricing: Monarch Money provides a 7-day free trial, with a monthly plan at $14.99 or an annual plan at $5.83 per month.
Rules For A Better Financial Future — You Need A Budget (YNAB)
Overview: Known for its four rules method, YNAB is popular among Canadians as it is designed to help users take control of their finances by assigning income to specific expenses and savings goals.
Basic budgeting: The first rule of YNAB, which is “Give Every Dollar A Job” encourages users to allocate every dollar as soon as it enters their account. It is followed by the second rule, which is “Embrace Your True Expenses” where users prepare ahead of a big, infrequent expense. Through these features, they can review how and why this much money is used.
YNAB also allows for adjustments over time, making it easy to move funds between categories like rent, bills, and leisure if financial priorities change.
Beyond budgeting: YNAB also allows for adjustments over time, making it easy to move funds between categories like rent, bills, and leisure if financial priorities change. This is in alignment with the third rule “Roll with the Punches” and the final rule “Age Your Money” where users can manage their funds flexibly and purposefully. It enhances the user’s awareness of how their money grows before the next income sets in.
Reflect As You Plan: The Reflect tab (previously Reports tab) enables users to reflect on the breakdown of their spending monthly, where they can easily point out their major expenses and effectively tweak their saving and spending goals to remain debt-free for the following month.
Pricing: YNAB offers a 34-day free trial, with a monthly fee of $14.99 USD or an annual fee of $9.08 USD/month.
Straightforward Finance Outlook — Empower Budget Planner
Overview: Empower is an ideal budgeting tool for anyone who wants a minimalistic yet efficient way of knowing their saving and spending habits by inputting the relevant details such as their loans, investments, credit card expenses and bank accounts to create a realistic budget.
Basic budgeting: Empower’s dashboard feature allows users to focus on balancing their savings and spending where their monthly income vs. monthly expenses statistics will be shown at the front and centre as soon as they log in.
Beyond budgeting: Apart from offering a budget planner, Empower also offers insights into portfolio performance and recommends ways to optimize investments for long-term growth. This is especially valuable for users with a focus on retirement planning, as Empower’s retirement planner helps estimate savings goals and timeframes for financial independence.
Responsible budgeting for individuals and families: Empower gives users great control over the organization of any big or small transactions. Under the “Budgeting” view, users can see a circle chart which categorizes each transaction by type (ATM withdrawals, groceries, bills, etc.). From there, the data will translate into a given percentage of the user’s monthly budget.
Pricing: Empower offers a free version with core features and a premium subscription for $8 USD per month, which unlocks more advanced planning and investment analysis tools.
Designed For The Modern Canadian Spender — Lunch Money
Overview: Lunch Money is an intuitive budgeting app that centres around focus and efficiency. It adopts a web-first approach where users have ample space to track their personal finances on their big laptop, and iPad screens.
Basic budgeting: The app allows users to view their budgeting in an expanded view (with stats, charts and visual aids) or compact view (full tables with figures filling up each row and column). Furthermore, it has pre-set general categories for budget that fit the modern-day lifestyle such as self-improvement, gifts, and ridesharing when they create a personal budget from scratch. The app also automatically tracks any recurring expenses each month.
Beyond budgeting: Lunch Money also provides options for tracking cryptocurrency assets, making it suitable for tech-savvy users with diverse financial portfolios. Additionally, it has a multi-currency tracker to record any cross-border expenses and review them in the currency of your choice — perfect for digital nomads, freelancers and travelers alike.
A Supportive Community: The Lunch Money app not only has an awesome customer support team but also a vibrant Discord community where users can connect directly with the founder of the app and other existing Lunch Money users. Feel free to shoot them any questions and share the using experience and feedback.
Pricing: Users can start with a 30-day free trial, with a monthly plan available at $10 USD or an annual plan for $100 USD, making it an affordable option for those seeking a straightforward budgeting solution.
Improve Your Finance Literacy With Superprof
Essentially, budgeting involves more than simply tracking income and expenses; it requires understanding spending habits, setting realistic goals, and making informed financial decisions.
Knowing how to create a feasible personal budget is only scratching the surface when it comes to improving your financial literacy.
At Superprof Canada, anyone and everyone can easily connect with a wide range of finance tutors from different parts of the country who specialize in these topics, offering structured lessons that can break down budgeting concepts for beginners and help those with more experience refine their personal financial goals.
Whether you are a high school student, a working adult, or a future retiree, you can benefit from these personalized finance lessons, with a flexible learning pace and learning mode (face-to-face or online lessons).
Our tutoring platform is user-friendly and easy to navigate. All you need to do is just browse and compare the tutors’ profiles by reviewing their basic information such as their tutoring qualifications, years of tutoring experience, tutoring specialization and scope, as well as their hourly rates. Not only that, you can also read the online reviews by their former students to get a glimpse of how they conduct their lessons.
In true budgeting fashion, you can also set a maximum budget for the hourly rates of the lessons and find a tutor who offers their lessons within the range (for example, $30 Canadian Dollar per hour). Once you have confirmed all the details, you can contact your desired tutor via the messaging feature and discuss further about your first lesson with them! Most Superprof tutors offer their first lesson for free, so be sure to grab this amazing opportunity!
Master budgeting with the right tools and knowledge!
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I would add Neontra to that list.
Hi Joe, Thanks for the suggestion!