App of the month – Pocketsmith

If you’ve ever been to one of The Mortgage Lab’s seminars, you will most likely have heard us rave about the app of the month.  It’s one of our favourites – PocketSmith.com.  Their company website is here and the app is available on Apple and Android.

PocketSmith does for budgeting what Xero did for accounting.  It makes categorising your expenses simple which means you know where the “holes are in your bucket”.  It also has a beautiful user experience.  No ugly old spreadsheets that eventually tell you the bad news.  This website generates your budget by categorising your spending and telling you what you have actually achieved.

Are you the type of person that gets to the end of your pay week and is itching for the next pay?  Sign up to PocketSmith (no, we don’t get paid for this, we just genuinely think they are awesome). They have a freemium option which is still very powerful but their upgrade means automatic importing of your bank statements.

And if that didn’t make it easy enough, PocketSmith emails you every week to give you an income vs expenses tally.  At this point, you will have no excuse for not attending to your budget.

One of the downsides to living in the land under the land-down-under, is that we often are excluded from things like awesome software.  Take, for example, how long it has taken for Amazon or Netflix to recognise that the dispersed and savage population of NZ are worthy of attention.

Well, with PocketSmith, most of the major New Zealand banks are included.  So the question has to be asked, how did we get so lucky that this brilliant bit of software included New Zealand?  It caters to Canada, UK, Australia as well as other global banks.  But why NZ?

Well, the answer is that this mass of beautiful code is based right here.  Well not here, for most of us.  Dunedin.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise given Xero’s rise to fame.

And frankly, starting an affordable budgeting app in a town represented mainly by paycheck-to-paycheck students, is little short of genius.

Summary:

This application is for everyone.  It doesn’t matter if you’re just beginning to save for a house, already own or are about to retire.  It’s never too late to look at your cashflow and to date, I haven’t seen a better website or application than PocketSmith.