Are you completely in the dark regarding how much money you can afford to spend each day? The free Level Money app helps people with fairly straightforward finances figure out their basic monthly budget by looking at income, bills, and intended savings. It then generates a number for the current day, week, and month that guides you toward an appropriate amount of spending money. Level Money takes care of some of the heavy lifting by connecting directly to your financial accounts (credit cards, checking account, etc.) to compute the key figures. It also has a neat and tidy comparison chart where you can track spending in certain categories, so you can see, for example, how much you spent last month at Amazon.com versus the current month. The app is available for Android and iPhone, I tested the latter.
While Level Money is useful if you have an uncomplicated financial life, it doesn't provide any way to track and manage financial goals. If what you need is an app that gives you daily guidance about how much you can spend, Level Money is a good mobile finance app to have. And it's free. But for a deeper dive with more complicated finances, stick with our top pick, the free Mint.com.
Security
Like most financial apps that connect directly to bank and credit card accounts, Level Money has read-only access. The app can see your transactions, account balances, and the like, but it doesn't have any ability to move money from one account to another. It also can't see your credit card numbers or other information that could be used to make purchases. In that sense, it's equally as safe as Mint , LearnVest , and other financial apps that work similarly.
Regardless, you can and should add a PIN to protect the app. If someone were to get their hands on your phone with the app installed, you wouldn't want them to see what kind of money you have and how you spend it.
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How Level Money Works
When you set up a free account in Level Money, you authorize access to your bank accounts and credit cards. The app then identifies incoming money and asks you to verify whether those transactions are part of your regular income or if they are anomalies. It's very simple and straightforward.
Once Level Money knows how much you earn, it asks you to tell it about bills you pay. You can enter these manually or select them from recent transactions. There are some additional tools so that you can tell Level Money whether you pay a certain bill or receive a certain kind of income monthly, every three months, once a year, and so on.
The next step is to adjust how much money you'd like to save every month. Level Money gives you a slider tool that shows you how your projected savings will affect how much you can spend. It's a simple tool, but it delivers information very effectively.
When I connected my financial accounts to the app, it included interest from interest-bearing accounts as part of my income. You can always exclude income or bills on an as-needed basis, as I did in this situation.
Once you've customized your income, bills, and savings, Level Money puts together a diagram showing those three categories, so you can see, at a glance, how the three pieces compare to one another.
Level Money doesn't do a whole lot more than that. It can't help you analyze how to get out of credit card debt, for example, or advise you on whether to consolidate loans. It's not going to suggest ways to better invest your money either, nor whether you could be getting a better rate on your mortgage. That's the kind of advice that Mint.com dispenses, however.
Using Level Money
Three bubbles on the homescreen indicate spendable dollars remaining today, this week, and this month. Each bubble visually represents how much spending is left with a fill line that drops as money flows out. A solid bubble means you haven't spent any money yet in that time period.
From a left-side menu, you can explore other areas of your Level Money account.
A Transactions tab pulls up a list of transactions from all your accounts. You can look through all of the items to make sure they are being labeled correctly, as well as to exclude any "unusual" activity. For example, if you had to charge a large hotel expense that will be reimbursed by your employer, you might want to exclude that line item, as well as the reimbursement later so that they don't affect how Level Money calculates your daily spending allowance. When you exclude an item, a dotted-line circle appears next to it.
Level Money gives you other indicators, such as one that shows a connection between money leaving my checking account and the same money going into my credit card account (because I paid my bill). Recurring income gets a plus sign encircled by two arrows. Recurring bills get a minus sign encircled by two arrows.
Another part of the app I like is called Insights, and it's where you can track specific types of spending. I set up my account to track my travel expenses, which vary dramatically for me month to month. I also wanted to see how much I spent each month in restaurants, and how much I spent at Amazon.com. Scroll down this page, and you get charts showing additional information about your spending habits and total bank account balances. It's nice to be able to see your money growing over time.
Level Money has some great alert capabilities, which are what make this financial app all the more useful. You can set the app to notify you, for example, when you have only 25 percent of your spendable money left. There's also an alert for when you reach the 50 percent mark in any given week. You can get notifications for low account balances, bank fees, purchases that cost more than $250, and more.
Even better than these warning flags are positive reinforcing notifications. For example, a Daily Rollover option notifies you when you have spent less than was in your budget for the prior day and month, so that your extra money rolls over to the next period. You could spend or save that money. It would be really neat if you could automatically stash that cash into a savings account, but remember, Level Money can't touch your money. There's another app that can. Qapital ($0.00 at Apple.com) (for iPhone only) opens a new savings account for you and then provides different ways to save small amounts of money frequently so they add up. You can round up purchases and stick the change in your savings account, or you can use some of the app's gamified suggestions for new ways to save.
Level Money is good at giving you a pretty basic idea of what you should spend by the day, the week, and the month. PocketGuard goes one step further by providing you a "Can I afford it?" tool. The feature is essentially a calculator: You type in the item you want to buy and how much it costs, and PocketGuard tells you whether you have the budget for it. What I don't like about that feature, though, is how much it oversimplifies your spending. Level Money never makes recommendations about what you can and cannot afford. That's up to you. It just gives you guidelines for certain time periods. PocketGuard tries to give you hard advice, but it doesn't know enough about your financial goals to tell you whether you should buy something, even if you can afford it.
For Help With Simple Finances
Although Level Money doesn't unseat PCMag's Editors' Choice financial app, Mint.com, the two are not mutually exclusive. You can very well use Mint to track your money, set your financial goals, and keep an eye on your credit score, while using Level Money to quickly get a read on how much money you can afford to spend today. And both apps are free.
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