Simplifi: An excellent app for managing your finances and saving.
Simplifi Quicken is a unique budgeting and expense tracking app that offers customizable features and emphasizes goal-setting. In addition to basic functions such as categorizing transactions, users can create a monthly spending plan, assign funds to different categories, monitor their net worth, and receive notifications about upcoming bills.
Unlike other personal finance platforms, Simplifi's investments dashboard includes pulldowns that enable tracking of individual investments, including cryptocurrency, and display their performance over time.
Quicken Simplifi's features are examined and compared to the competition in a CNBC Select article.
Overview
Quicken has entered the budgeting app market with Quicken Simplifi, a user-friendly and customizable web-based platform. Unlike other apps, Simplifi automatically syncs with your bank accounts, credit cards, and loans. Additionally, it connects with your investment accounts, a feature not commonly found in this industry. Although there is no free version, Simplifi is significantly less expensive than competitors with similar features.
While Quicken Simplifi is a great budgeting app with a simple design and many goal-setting features, if you need more advanced financial management tools, you may want to explore other options.
Features
To help you achieve your budgeting objectives, Quicken Simplifi offers a comprehensive range of features.
Alerts
Upcoming bills, spending limits, and unusual transactions are alerted to users via the Notifications dropdown.
Savings goals
You can set personalized savings goals, such as a wedding or vacation, and track your progress towards them with Simplifi. Set a monthly and yearly deadline for each goal, and the app will inform you whether you are ahead or behind schedule, with the difference in months.
Spending plan
Simplifi users can quickly see their monthly income after accounting for recurring bill payments and savings goals, giving them a clear picture of what's available to spend. They can look up to a year in advance, filter by category or examine other spending not tied to bills or planned expenses. By combining the available, planned, and "other" categories, users can view a pie chart that shows how much money is available by month and day.
Customized reports
Simplifi's customizable reports, which can be set up based on spending, income, or savings, are one of its top features. The information is presented in both raw numbers and graph form, making it easy to understand.
Expense tracker
With Simplifi, users can categorize their spending with distinct labels and monitor specific transactions. If you're concerned about your coffee expenditure, you can create a Watchlist for coffee and track your monthly spending on lattes, calculate your average, and determine if you've exceeded your budget.
Refund tracker
Simplifi will notify you of your expected refund and inform you if it arrives or not, and if it doesn't match your expectations.
Investment dashboard
Simplifi offers a comprehensive solution for tracking retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, and more, providing real-time market value and changes. The app offers detailed information on the assets in each account, including current price, dividend yield, and relevant news.
Sharing
You can share your Simplifi account with another person, even if they don't have a subscription.
Credit monitoring
Simplifi's Credit Score feature provides users with monthly VantageScore® 3.0 credit scores, credit reports from Equifax®, and tips on improving and protecting their credit score.
Achievements
Simplifi offers badges to help you achieve your financial goals, such as logging in regularly, sticking to your budget, and reaching net worth milestones.
Price
Quicken Simplifi is only available as an annual subscription for $35.88, which is equivalent to $2.99 a month. Unlike other budgeting apps with similar features, which can cost between $8 and $15 a month, there is no monthly billing or free version.
Subscribers can request a full refund within the first 30 days of signing up, either directly from Quicken or from Google Play or the Apple App Store.
How Quicken Simplifi compares
In comparison to two leading budgeting apps, how does Quicken Simplifi perform?
Quicken Simplifi vs. Empower
Empower offers free money management tools such as a budget planner, net worth tracker, and cash flow tracker, but its focus is on overall wealth rather than daily spending habits. This can provide a broad overview of your financial standing, but may not be as helpful if you're trying to reduce spending or remember to pay bills.
Empower offers personalized investment and retirement planning advice for deposits over $100,000. Learn more with CNBC Select's review of Empower.
Quicken Simplifi vs. YNAB
YNAB utilizes a zero-based budgeting system, where users plan for every dollar that comes in and out, rather than just tracking expenses. The app automatically syncs with bank, credit card, and investment accounts, but users must manually categorize their spending. This approach can encourage intentional spending, but it also requires more effort. In contrast to Simplifi, YNAB offers both monthly and annual subscription plans, with a 34-day free trial available. For more information, check out CNBC Select's review of YNAB.
Bottom line
Detailed savings plans, customizable reports, and in-depth expense tracking are available at an affordable price with Quicken Simplifi. This platform is suitable for both experienced budgeters and beginners looking to gain control over their finances.
Why trust CNBC Select?
Our mission at CNBC Select is to deliver top-notch service journalism and in-depth consumer advice to our readers, enabling them to make well-informed decisions when it comes to managing their finances. Each review we publish is the result of thorough reporting by our team of expert writers and editors, who possess extensive knowledge of personal finance products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content independently, without any input from our commercial team or external third parties. We uphold the highest journalistic standards and ethics in everything we do. For more information on how we select the best budgeting and expense tracker apps, please refer to our methodology.
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