Budgeting Apps: Safe or Risky?
Budgeting can be life-changing for people who can’t manage their finances properly and need a helping hand.
Budgeting apps can help you keep your expenses in check and try to make sure you make ends meet. However, once budget charts changed from spreadsheets to personal finance apps. They now have access to bank accounts of their users. Therefore, there is a big question of whether such apps are actually safe to use.
photo/ Rudy and Peter Skitterians
While Canada online payday loans can help you solve urgent financial difficulty, budgeting apps will be a great additional option for knowing where your money goes.
Since budgeting apps like Mint, Wally and PocketGuard were released ten years ago, a lot of attention was gathered around security risk connected with having to give out banking passwords in order to use these applications.
Are the budgeting apps more secure these days? Should consumers be still worried?
Mint.com
Mint budgeting app is probably one of the most popular and widespread tools. Within the last several years it has gained even more popularity among those who want to keep track of their finances or need to save for a big purchase.
Using this app you can connect all your banking accounts so that you know everything about your deposits and withdrawals. In addition, you can pay the bills, track your spending and double-check your budget before you opt for any big purchase. If you enable various notifications, you will be alerted about any upcoming payments or if your bank account is below a certain point.
Receipts
This app allows to file customers’ receipts from work or home, so it’s another great option to track and manage your spending.
The advantage or this budgeting tool is that you are able to take a photo of your receipt and this information will be immediately stored in your app.
Receipts app is useful for categorizing your entries while recording the date, the amount and even the location where the money was withdrawn.
This app is available only for Apple devices. Otherwise, you can use a similar SmartReceiptsPro app for other smartphones.
What Are The Risks And How to Avoid Them?
The above-mentioned apps are helpful for managing your budget.
On the other hand, they require access to your sensitive information which can make you vulnerable to fraud and scams because of a data breach.
Also, a third party might get access to the passwords of your bank accounts.
Therefore, such alternative options like Goodbudget and Dollarbird have been designed to allow people to manually input their expenses.
In case you want to opt for an automated budgeting app for the sake of convenience, then do some research and pay attention to security measures and privacy policy of the app you’d like to use.
Some budgeting tools were designed by trustworthy financial institutions. This means your personal data will be most likely safe and secure. For instance, Mint app is encrypted with 128 bit SSL, which is used for protection of your digital data files.
Search for such apps which use end-to-end encryption as it guarantees your data won’t be accessed by third parties.
Nowadays we use our smartphones for everything including the ability to track and manage our finances with the help of budgeting apps. But making sure that your personal information is safe and secure is the top priority. So choose wisely which app best suits your needs.
Author: Miranda Coal
