Best apps to manage your finances, health, and goals
“Let’s just look it up real quick!” – with the internet in the palm of our hands, this is a sentence we hear or say a lot. The internet and apps on your phone give you quick answers and have probably helped settle more than one argument in your life. But there is also a wide range of apps that can make your life easier by helping you with recurring issues. In this article, we want to recommend some apps that make your life easier and help you manage your finances, your physical and mental health, and achieve your goals.
Finances
Start mixing friends and money – with the right app!
Have you ever gone on a trip with friends and struggled to keep up with who paid for what? When you share costs in a group of people or just between two, write all expenses in an app which will help you calculate the balances. Splitwise for example lets you write down all expenses, who paid for them and how the cost will be shared. At the end of your trip or whenever you are ready to settle the debts the app will show exactly who owes how much to who.
Stop overspending with a budgeting app
Is there too much month left at the end of the money? A budgeting app helps you to keep track of your spendings. This way you can identify where you have the tendency to overspend and change your buying habits. Apps like PocketGuard connect to your bank account and keep track of monthly fixed expenses, tell you how much you have left to treat yourself each month, and can automatically put some money aside to save towards a concrete goal.
Health
Start meditating and sleeping better
Meditating is more than just sitting quietly in the same position for a while. If you have ever tried it you will know how difficult it is to stop having a million thoughts running through your head at all times. Guided meditation will help you learn to calm down and you will see the benefits of being able to focus on just one thing and being more mindful. The app Calm has a variety of guided meditation audios and additional features like good night stories for adults that help you turn off your thoughts and fall asleep. It also offers different kinds of music to help you focus on your work, relax, or sleep.
Stop wondering what’s in your food
If you have an allergy you are probably used to checking the ingredients in the foods you buy. But even if you don’t, you might want to know what exactly you are putting in your body. However, sometimes it can be difficult to decipher the list of ingredients. There are several apps that can help you find out more about the products you buy in supermarkets. With the app Healthy Food you can take pictures of a product and its ingredients and it will explain if it’s healthy for you or not.
Goals
Start learning something new
There are so many apps that will make you spend more time on your phone but in a good way! How about discovering a new language? Apps like Duolingo help you start from zero or improve your language skills with writing, listening, and speaking exercises. If you want to explore your creativity or strengthen your professional skills, the app Skillshare might be for you. With thousands of bite-sized online classes, you can dive into a variety of topics ranging from calligraphy to learning how to launch a new product. There is so much you can learn and train your brain is always a good idea!
Stop procrastinating
Most of us will agree that social media is fun, but probably a big procrastination enabler! There are many apps that can help you track how much time you spend on Facebook or Twitter. With AppDetox you can decide how much time you allow yourself to spend on specific apps and get notifications when you break your own rules. The app Forest goes one step further and encourages you to not look at your phone at all. While you focus on something else, a little tree is planted in the app and it grows bigger the longer you leave your phone alone. You won’t only be happy to see your little digital forest grow, you also collect coins which the company behind the app donates to the organization Trees for the Future which plants actual trees.
How about you, do you use apps to help you manage your everyday life? What are your favorites? Tell us in the comments!
