Check out Pluto, a free personal finance app that is designed for the newer generation of budgeters: college students. It was created by the students for students with a focus on their unique and specific habits. The service concentrates on setting realistic goals and making your interaction with money as fun as relevant as possible.
(Click the button above to learn more about Pluto)
An Introduction To Pluto
If you aren’t a fan of traditional budgeting apps with cash flow terminology and spending graphs, then you may want to check out Pluto. This platform focuses on helping you meet your financial goals. It lets you set your own savings challenges, so you can stay motivated when you reach your small, realistic targets.
Maybe you just want to spend less money on certain things this week such as eating fast food or buying coffee. Maybe you want to save money for a future concert. With Pluto, you can set and track goals to see your progress as each week passes.
Pluto has since gotten a lot of attention from the media, including:
- CNN Money. A recommended app “to keep tabs on expenses”
- PT Money. One of “The Best Personal Finance Software for Taming Your Budget (2019)”
- Stacking Benjamins (#1 personal finance podcast by Kiplinger). “This whole idea of gamifying your goal is pretty exciting.”
- Budgets Are Sexy. “12 New Financial Companies to Watch Out For”
Pluto Features
As a new way to motivate college students to save money, the offer unique “Spend Less” challenges, behavioral nudges and smart notifications to help you win at the game of saving. The best part is that this service is completely free.
Automatic Tracking & Categorization
With Pluto, you can securely connect to over 10,000 financial institutions in the United States. Linking to your various accounts will allow the app to automatically track, analyze and categorize your transactions.
Search Transactions Easily
If you need to pinpoint a transaction, you can easily search for it by bank account, merchant name or category (ie: Chase, Lyft or Fast Food).
Relevant Savings Goals
The best way to successfully save money is to be motivated. In order to be motivated, you have to set some highly desirable short and mid-term goals. This means pick a goal that is right for you and that means something to you. Because, to be honest, who actually cares about retirement savings when you are in college. However, Pluto does help you walk the line between needs, wants, and your life obligations (such as student loans).
Personal Insights
This feature lets you learn about your finances and habits in a way that’s not overwhelming. You’ll get snapshot overviews, which you can go into further detail, but only if you want to. Personal Insights are combined with Spending Challenges, so you get your statistics paired with actionable suggestions to help you get to where you want to be financially.
Spending Challenges
Pluto interprets the numbers and graphs in your Personal Insights, then tells you what actions to take towards your savings goals, based on your personal finances, step by step. These actionable steps are called “Spend Less” challenges.
The idea is to spend less where you can so you can reach your savings goals. For example, you can spend less than your weekly average on buying coffee and reward yourself by saving what you would’ve spent on a vacation instead.
Peer Insights
This feature allows you to anonymously see how your finances compare with similar peers, grouped by common criteria like age, income, relationship status and college campus.
Smart Alerts
Behavioral Nudges are notifications that encourage you to stay on track with your spending challenges, so you can save more for your goals. Additionally, just like other budgetting apps, you will get notifications when new transactions post to make sure there aren’t any fraudulent activities on your account.
Limitations
The service doesn’t offer robust analytics capabilities, but that’s because Pluto is trying to keep it simple and relevant to most college students. If you need more, check out Mint or Personal Capital.
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Bottom Line
This is a great free mobile budgeting app that will help college students and young people meet their financial goals. Pluto does this by setting up challenges for you to meet that will motivate you to meet your goals. Additionally, the special alerts they send can help you stay on track as well as track any transactions made on your account.
(Click the button above to learn more about Pluto)
