In partnership with Rocket Money. Editor’s Note: We only select and work with partners that meet our quality standards, so you can rest assured we only endorse products we believe in.
I’m a compulsive organizer. My bookshelf is alphabetized, my documents are color coded, my grocery lists are subdivided by aisle. The one thing I’ve been too busy to sit down and organize are the sneaky little subscriptions and charges that have piled up over the years. It feels like every other month, I discover a lingering subscription that I forgot to cancel or a bill that’s suddenly gone up after an intro deal has lapsed. Honestly, the prospect of combing through all of these little charges and canceling them one by one has historically made me break out into a cold sweat.
But earlier this year I realized that what was once a handful of cheap monthly app subscriptions had ballooned into a pile of charges that was starting to significantly add to my monthly budget. When I heard about the Rocket Money app, I was more than ready to finally take charge of my finances and organize my (shockingly long) list of subscriptions & miscellaneous bills. But would this app really help save me time on financial organization? I decided to download the app and put it to the test.
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Subscription Manager
It took me less than 10 minutes to download the app, create an account, and connect my bank accounts. The app prompted me to fill out a bit of personal information about my spending and choose from a list of financial goals.
First things first was taking a comprehensive look at my subscriptions. The app scanned all of my accounts and in about 30 seconds came up with a list of subscriptions I’d signed up for across various cards. For some of the subscriptions (like Amazon Prime and Spotify), I could send a cancellation request directly in the Rocket Money app. For others that required me to go to the subscription website, the app gave me step by step instructions for how to cancel my subscription. Instead of spending hours combing through my various bank statements, I’d identified and canceled unnecessary subscriptions in 30 minutes – a huge time saver. The app also flagged a few bills where there are competitive rates available – identifying savings that I could recapture by switching utility providers.
Spending Tracker & Budget
I’d used some spending trackers in the past, but Rocket Money’s spending tracker function was way more approachable and accurate than any service I’d seen before. It only takes a couple of taps to relabel charges depending on how you want to organize your spending categories, and you can even create your own custom spending categories – especially useful for me as a self-employed freelancer. The app also makes it easy to flag recurring charges and relocate them into your bills section or subscription list. After a few minutes making sure that all of my charges were correctly labeled, I was able to look at a pie chart breaking down the exact percentage breakdown of my monthly spending. I was immediately able to identify categories that I could easily cut down on (food and shopping, of course) and what my non-negotiable monthly costs are.
The app also makes it really easy to split bills like utilities or rent that you might share with another person, so that your spending tracker only accounts for the portion of the bill you actually pay for – a great feature I haven’t encountered anywhere else! With a few taps, I was able to separate out my half of the rent from my roommate’s, and tell my spending tracker to ignore the half she pays. Because of features like charge splitting and custom categories, the accuracy of this spending tracker is far superior to others that I’ve tried over the years. The way Rocket Money graphically displays these breakdowns in graphs and pie charts made sense to even my math-challenged brain – a first for me with a personal finance app!
Once I set up my monthly spending tracker and got a realistic sense of my spending habits, the app helped me set up my monthly budget. It automatically averaged my monthly income across the last three months, setting a baseline monthly earnings. Then, it prompted me to select which bills and utilities I considered absolutely necessary. After that, I could use my remaining earnings to set budgets for each spending category, helping me see where I was overspending and where I could budget less.
Financial Goals
At this point, I realized that I was genuinely having fun organizing my finances on the app. Between the feeling of control it gave me over my subscriptions and the clarity I now felt about budgeting – and the satisfying color coding of the spending categories – I couldn’t believe how relaxed I felt compared to before I’d started. I finally felt confident enough to set some financial goals, inputting how much I wanted to put towards savings every month. The financial goals section of the app was, like the others, visually approachable and intuitive to use. You can even set up an automatic savings transfer, so you don’t have to think about adding to an external savings account every month.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, I went into this process feeling disorganized and exhausted by worrying about my spending while not having the tools to track it. I don’t know how much time I’ve wasted trying to sort through credit card statements, hunting for places to cut down on my expenses. After spending an hour setting up every aspect of my Rocket Money app, I feel calmer about my financial planning than I have in ages. In less than 10 minutes, I’d organized my subscriptions and made a plan of which to cancel, saving me a ton of time. Whether you’re a freelancer figuring out how to budget while living paycheck to paycheck, or feel in control of your finances and are looking for a way to set long and short term financial goals, Rocket Money is a fast, intuitive, and – dare I say it – fun way to organize your finances. This is far and away the best personal finance app I’ve tried.
