With all the different assets and elements that go into it, wealth can quickly become a complex topic.
But an even more complex topic in today’s technology-laden world?
Choosing the best application to help you manage your wealth.
Knowing that, we put together this buyer’s guide to help you understand:
- The most important steps to choosing the best wealth management app for your needs
- The best best personal finance apps on the market
- Our recommendation for the overall best wealth management app in 2022
A Step-By-Step Guide to Picking Out the Best Best Wealth Management App
There are two ways to go about choosing the best wealth management app.
The first is hitting the “download” button on the first app that pops up in your search — fast and easy, but unlikely to be very effective.
Or, you could follow the four simple steps below to find a wealth management app that’s going to be the most effective for your needs.
Step 1: Know What Your Personal Finance Goals Are
Ultimately, a wealth management app is a tool.
And a pivotal step of selecting the tool that will work the best for you is determining exactly what work you want it to do.
That’s right, it’s time to talk goals.
What goals are you striving to achieve with your wealth assets? Are you an investor looking to maximize the return on your traditional — or nontraditional — assets? Or maybe you want to double your savings rate without necessarily getting a pay increase at work? It’s OK to choose a few goals, but keep in mind whatever app you choose will be most effective if you shoot for fewer and more closely related goals.
Knowing what you want to do with your money will help you move through the next steps and choose a wealth management app that’ll offer guidance and grant insights to put you well on your way to achieving your goals.
Step 2: Get Familiar With the Best Wealth Management App Features
Now that you have a goal or two in mind for your hard-earned assets, you want to start thinking about the wealth management app features that can help you meet these goals.
Here are some helpful wealth management features you should be aware of when shopping for your best wealth management app:
Financial planning
Financial planning is the process of thinking about how your current assets and projected asset progression will meet your financial goals. Apps with this feature will likely focus on longer-term goals, but may also include the next feature we’re about to discuss.
Budgeting
An app with a budgeting feature will help you track your income and expenses. Ideally, you’ll be able to see these numbers compared to one another over different periods of time and in different spending categories (groceries, car-related expenses, bills, etc.) so that you can see how you're spending and adjust accordingly. Budgeting carefully is often credited with helping people achieve their financial plans.
Bill Pay
An app that helps you pay bills automatically can be especially helpful for people who have a lot of individual payments or trouble remembering to make them on time.
Saving
An in-app savings chart will help you make sure you’re putting enough cash aside or making other financial decisions that are moving you toward your savings goals.
Transaction and Balance Tracking
Being able to see your transactions and the balance of your various accounts can be especially helpful in a wealth management app for people who are interested in making payments, saving more, and budgeting.
Net Worth View
Net worth can be defined as everything you own minus everything you owe. What you own includes assets like cash, property, etc. What you owe includes liabilities like credit card debts, loans, etc.
Net worth is often considered a key metric of wealth management because it can tell you at a glance whether your wealth is moving in the right direction (which is up!) over a given period of time.
Credit Tracking
Another helpful metric that wealth management apps can help you monitor is your credit score. Tracking your credit score can give you an idea of your overall financial health and if you’re doing enough to tend to and grow it over time.
Multi-Device Availability
Want to be able to check your finances on the go? Prefer to check your progress on your desktop computer where you can dig into the details more easily? Look for an app that’s easy to use and syncs across all the devices you want to use.
Bird’s-Eye View of Overall Wealth
It can be surprisingly hard to find a wealth management app with a dashboard that can provide a useful view of many different assets all at once. Keep that in mind if this is a feature that’s going to be important to you.
Investment Assistance
If your financial goals include investing, you may want to seek out a wealth management app that’s equipped to offer investing guidance — automated or otherwise.
Financial Information Storage
This is a more unique feature, but people who rely on a lot of documentation to protect their assets (such as wills or trusts) can benefit greatly from a feature that keeps these documents and other information safe.
Alternative Investment Management
More and more often, modern investors are diversifying into alternative investments including digital assets like domain names, cryptocurrency, and more. If that’s your style, you better make sure your wealth management app is equipped to keep up (and not many are — so stick around for our best app recommendation later!)
Step 3: Dive Deeper to Make Sure Your Favorite Money Management Apps Align With Your Needs
Beyond features, most of us also have some preferences when it comes to the tools we want to work with. Here are some questions to ask yourself to make sure you’ll be happy with any wealth management app you’re considering.
Does the Cost Fit Into Your Budget? (Even If It’s Free)
Of course, you aren’t going to bother signing up for a wealth management app if you’re not willing to pay the price.
However, price can go beyond what’s on the sticker.
Make sure you’re aware of any hidden fees, ongoing payments, or costs that increase with the worth of your assets (many investment advisors work this way, for example).
And also beware that, sometimes, the most expensive apps of all are free.
That’s because you may be paying for them with your personal data.
Mint is an example of a “free” app that sells user data to advertisers in order to generate revenue. Today it’s important to remember the adage that if a product is free — you’re probably the product.
Is It Pleasant to Use?
If you’re a person who dreads managing your wealth, it might be because no one ever showed you that it doesn’t always have to be a giant pain.
Ease of use should be a huge factor in whatever wealth management app you end up using. The best way to make sure an app is going to make your experience pleasant is to sign up for a free trial period if one is available, read reviews, or even see if you can find some videos online of a person using the app to do some of the things you might use it for.
What’s the Level of Involvement?
Some people love diving into every detail of every asset on their own. Some crave personalized assistance when it comes to financial management. And others want to automate and ignore any element of wealth management and growth they possibly can.
None of these approaches are wrong. The only thing that’s wrong is choosing a wealth management app that isn’t outfitted to handle how hands on — or hands off — you want to be.
How’s the Security?
Now that you’re starting to get serious about choosing from one of your favorite wealth management apps, it’s time to make sure you’re thinking about one serious topic: Security.
When your big life goals — and of course the assets that power them — are on the line, you want to take as few risks as you can.
Taking a calculated investment risk with a safety net? Go for it. Choosing a financial app without double-checking that it’s going to keep your data safe? Not so fast.
While you of course can’t prevent any accidents or hacks from happening, you can make sure you’re in a good position to avoid those situations altogether by choosing a wealth management app that’s provided by a reliable company, setting up a strong password, avoiding using it on public networks, and taking other basic safety measures.
Step 4: Check Out Independent Reviews
At this point you should have a shortlist of the best wealth management apps for your unique goals and preferences.
Our final piece of advice before you truly commit to signing up, paying, and starting to input your assets is to track down at least a few independent reviews of the product.
What are independent reviews? Ones that don’t come from the provider or anyone affiliated with the provider who may be incentivized to give a more positive review than they would otherwise. Bonus points if this review is from someone either in the financial industry or who has experience with several financial apps so that they can make helpful comparisons.
While you of course want to look for reviews that highlight the positives of your favorite wealth management apps, it can also be helpful to know what they don’t like, as well. Often those little details that would prevent you from being able to use an app or the pet peeves that may just put you off using it are only uncovered when downsides are discussed.
The Best Best Personal Finance Apps for 2022
The right financial app can help you create a diverse portfolio and meet your financial goals. It’s time to use the above guidance and our following round up of recommendations to choose your best wealth management tool.
Kubera: An All-Around Wealth Management App for Diverse Investors
While no single app is going to have every single feature needed to meet every single financial goal — we can say that we’re sure as heck trying to build one here at Kubera.
Kubera’s personal balance sheet software makes for the overall best wealth management app in 2022 and beyond.
Why? Because our portfolio tracker focuses on helping you monitor and optimize all your important wealth assets — we’re talking cash, bank accounts, checking accounts, investments accounts, stocks, vehicles, art, real estate, and even digital assets like domain names, cryptocurrency, and more.
Want to track the value of your homes, vehicles, and even web domains? Add them to Kubera and, thanks to our partnerships with leading asset experts (such as Zillow and EstiBot), we’ll keep your dashboard up to date with the latest market value of these assets.
Interested in stocks and cryptocurrencies? Take advantage of our stock and crypto ticker functionality so you can always make the smartest purchasing and selling decisions possible.
It doesn’t even matter where these assets originate from because we built Kubera to support all major currencies, so your balances are displayed in your preferred currency and aligned with the latest exchange rates, in real-time.
And you can keep an eye on how every one of your assets impacts your investment portfolio with our beautifully-designed charts and a recap feature that enables you to see asset and portfolio performance at the most granular level.
Kubera even automatically calculates IRR for investments in your preferred currency. Just make sure the details around price paid, current value, and changes in cash flow are up to date. We’ll add in the holding time and bam, you’ve got an IRR (internal rate of return is like a more detailed form of ROI) number that lets you know how well your assets are performing!
Another distinctive feature of Kubera’s dashboard is beneficiary management, which ensures that all the ancillary assets that help protect your wealth — such as your trust, will, and other estate planning documentation — are stored safely until it’s time for them to be transferred to a beneficiary of your choosing.
And speaking of safety, our business model is what we like to call “privacy-friendly.”
Not only do we take bank-level security measures and employ cutting-edge encryption practices, but we also keep your credentials safe by only partnering with industry-leading financial account aggregator services.
And we do it all by charging a simple, yearly price so we don’t ever have to sell your sensitive data or annoy you with upsells.
Kubera is available via desktop, iOS, and Android. See how it fits into your financial life by checking out more on our how Kubera works page.
Sign up now to see why Kubera is truly the most powerful all-in-one wealth management platform for today’s diverse investors.
Personal Capital: Personal Finance Tools + Financial Advisor Services
Personal Capital is a popular financial product that offers free access to their financial dashboard. Using this dashboard, users can monitor cash flow, view net worth, take control of budgeting, and even form long-term plans for goals like retirement.
However, it’s important to know that at Personal Capital, free comes with a cost. They employ a robust upselling, data collection, and advertising program with all of their free version users.
Personal Capital offers access to financial advisors, for a fee, for investors with $100,000 in assets. In the next tier up, users can take advantage of active investment portfolio management, for a fee of course.
Personal Capital is ideal for inventors who value support from a financial advisor, instead of doing it all on their own.
You Need a Budget: A Customizable Budgeting App
We admire You Need a Budget (YNAB) for its clear goal for users: to help them gain control over their money.
The budgeting tool does this through software that enforces four guiding principles:
- Make sure every dollar has a job
- Accept actual expenses
- Go with the flow of life
- Let your money age
YNAB can be connected to your bank account and synced across devices. This allows users to employ YNAB as an expense tracker to categorize and monitor spending habits, watch progress on goals, set up automatic payments so you never miss any upcoming bills, and even generate detailed reports — all to build a great budget for yourself or your household.
Especially for those who have less “wiggle room” in their financial situation, using a tool like YNAB to track spending and build a realistic budget can be pivotal in keeping cash on hand to build the portfolio of your dreams.
Acorns: Saving and Investing Tool That’s Perfect for Beginners
Acorns offers a little bit of everything to help individuals grow their “oaks” for what we think is a pretty reasonable fee — $5 max.
The investment app portion of Acorns includes pre-built, diverse portfolios that are great to help beginning investors get set up. Recurring investments, automatic rebalancing, and educational features help investors learn everything they need to know to save for short-term and longer-term goals, like retirement.
Acorns’ FDIC-insured checking accounts come complete with all the features you need for personal use, from a debit card to bill payment. And, their savings account has a cool feature that enables users to automatically invest a portion of every paycheck, ensuring that their savings goals don’t slip away from them.
For DIY investors who are just starting out or for those who don’t intend to build out a complex portfolio, Acorns offers a great variety of high-level features.
Which of These Financial Apps Offers Your Favorite Features?
You can finally end your search for the single best wealth management app with all the features you need.
Kubera is a cutting-edge wealth, asset, and net worth tracker that any investor can use no matter the size or the diversity of your portfolio.
Sign up for your Kubera subscription now and get to organizing, managing, and optimizing in just moments. Or, if you work with a financial advisor or wealth manager, let them know you’re interested in Kubera and how they can use our modern, white-label-ready platform for their client portal.
