Advertiser Disclosure
Miss Mint? Monarch Money Is the Budget App You’re Looking for
Monarch can make growing your savings easier
The shuttering of Mint in early 2024 has made room for lesser-known budgeting apps to shine—and for a new top pick on Buy Side’s rating of the best budgeting apps. Whether you’re a former-Mint user or a first-time budgeter, Monarch, with its ease of use and smartly designed features, is more than worthy of your attention and the crown.
The app includes just the right blend of automation and manual work, which means that it won’t take up too much of your time but will require you to be proactive. That helps make it habit-forming, which is just about the most important trait a budgeting app can have. After all, a budget you never look at won’t do you much good.
While Monarch isn’t as well known as Mint—which was owned by Intuit, the software giant behind TurboTax—it has gained traction since launching in 2018, and the company says it averaged 20 times as many daily sign-ups in January than in the month before news broke that Mint was shutting down. Monarch has also made the transition easy for former Mint users, adding the ability to import transactions from the app using either a CSV file or a Chrome extension.
The app is welcoming, even for first-time budgeters, but is also robust enough for those with experience. Monarch works well for individuals and couples alike, which helps make it a good fit for just about everyone.
The app costs $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, which makes it one of pricier budgeting apps we reviewed. But if you use it right, that cost will come back to you—and then some—with the amount you’re able to save.
How to use the Monarch budget app
To get started with Monarch, you connect your various financial accounts. The app allows for a range of integrations—including checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards and various debts including student and personal loans—giving you a wide look at your income and expenses. You can also add assets such as property, vehicles and cryptocurrency to calculate your total net worth.
After connecting your accounts, the next thing you do is input your goals—making a down payment on a house or paying off a student loan, for example—and target amounts for each. The app will then create a line item and let you set the appropriate monthly contribution.
To make your spending plan, Monarch relies on the zero-based budgeting technique, meaning it encourages you to plan for every dollar of your monthly income. The app uses your past spending to suggest monthly budget amounts for various spending categories, such as groceries or fitness. For each category, you can see the amount budgeted for the month and can toggle between how much you’ve spent so far and how much you have left under budget.
The app’s main dashboard offers a look at your overall budget, letting you view your net worth and recent transactions, track your investments, compare this month’s spending to last month’s, and see your progress toward your savings goals. The page is highly customizable, letting you choose which to include and where they should be located so you can give priority to what’s most important to you.
The app also gives you the option to invite other people into your budgeting dashboard, making it a good fit for couples or families. I invited my partner by email and she was able to add herself with just a few clicks. You have the option to remove people you’ve added.
Monarch pros
- Focus on savings
- Easy for families to share
- Lots of ways to sort purchases
If saving money for the long-term is your goal, you’ve come to the right place. By starting with your goals, Monarch helps you stay accountable. You’ll need to ensure that your spending aligns with your savings goals when you map out your monthly budget.
Monarch also features more automation and fewer notifications than other apps, which makes it appealing to those who don’t want to be hands-on with every transaction. The app’s auto-categorizing of transactions was highly accurate in our testing and is highly customizable, allowing you to create rules for designating future transactions based on merchant and/or dollar amount.
On the transactions page, you can sort your purchases into high-level categories (auto and transport), midlevel subcategories (gas, public transportation) or specific merchants to see where you’re spending the most money—a useful feature I haven’t seen elsewhere. The page has a clean design that makes it simple to view your finances at a glance, and small emojis next to each subcategory let you quickly grasp which category you’re viewing.
Conveniently, the experience is essentially the same whether you’re using the web or mobile app version. Some visualizations that automatically show up on the web require a click on mobile. As I do with all budgeting apps, I found myself almost exclusively using the mobile version.
Monarch cons
- Less intuitive
- More expensive than alternatives
You’ll need to poke around a bit to figure out where everything lives. In some cases, it took me a while to realize that a certain part of the screen was clickable, such as a section that let me toggle between my “actual” and “remaining” monthly budgets in a given category.
And, as previously mentioned, it’s one of the more expensive budgeting apps available.
Our budget app methodology
To pick the Best Budgeting Apps, we selected and downloaded 18 apps based on customer reviews and our own discussion with five financial planners.
While using each app, we noted whether it offered various features and, if it did, how good those features were. Those features included: automated suggested budgets, auto-categorization of transactions, the ability to connect with various accounts, price and more.
We also took into consideration each app’s design, intuitiveness and ease of use. To see our full methodology, check out our full budgeting app ranking.
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