AD this is a paid post in collaboration with Money Dashboard
Financial goals are a key part of setting ourselves up for success and making sure that we are living life in the way that we want to- both presently and in the future. Your financial goals could be anything from saving £300 a month to buying your first home. Ideally your smaller monthly financial goals will feed into a bigger, longer term financial goal.
In order to stay on track to achieve your long term and short term money goals, you will need to manage your money in a way that allows you to enjoy every day life whilst saving for the future. Often, this will come in the form of setting a budget plan and keeping an eye on your everyday spending. This is where using a dedicated personal finance app can really help you- they’re easily accessible on your smartphone, and straightforward to use.
The money tool that we are going to be looking at today is Money Dashboard which is a fantastic app for managing your money and staying on budget.
What is Money Dashboard?
Money Dashboard is an easy to use platform, which helps you to stay on top of your finances and practise good money management. Money Dashboard was awarded Best Personal Finance App at the 2020 British Bank Awards, and it has over 600,000 users!
The app has recently undergone some improvements, and there is now a brand new app available called Money Dashboard Neon which allows you to connect all of your bank accounts and credit cards and view them in one user-friendly dashboard.
How does Money Dashboard work?
Once you’ve connected all of your accounts and credit cards, Money Dashboard will then pull together all of your balances and transactions. Then, the app will categorise your spending and income into ‘buckets’ which are essentially areas of spending such as bills, groceries and entertainment.
This means you can very clearly see where your money goes each month. Money Dashboard also has a brilliant feature called ‘Balance After Bills’ which as the name suggests will tell you how much money you will have left after your upcoming bills. This makes it so much easier to budget, and to determine how much you are able to spend to still have money left over for your bills. This is super helpful if you need to pay your rent a couple of days before you get paid each month!
How can Money Dashboard help me to achieve my financial goals?
As well as automatically organising your spending into categories, Money Dashboard also allows you to set up simple budgets to track your progress towards your financial goals.
You can set a target amount of expenditure for each of your spending categories. For example, if you want to spend no more than £100 this month on fuel, you can create a target for this category within the app and track your progress against it.
Because you can easily see what you are spending in each category at a glance, you can also identify areas which you could cut back on, and open up more room for saving towards your financial goals.
How is Money Dashboard different to other budgeting apps?
The biggest stand out difference is that Money Dashboard is not just an app- you can access Money Dashboard through any device, including a computer. If you currently budget using Excel documents, this means that you can do all of your money management from your computer if you wish to.
Money Dashboard is completely free, and doesn’t rely on third party products thanks to their data monetisation strategy. Although they may include partner offers in the future to the benefit of their users, they’ve assured me that it will be nag-free.
You can also use Money Dashboard to make ‘in app’ transfers between your accounts which makes it super easy to manage your money from one easy interface rather than switching between multiple apps within your phone.
Money Dashboard also has a feature called ‘Offline Accounts’ which is where you can add custom amounts of money and see it all presented on the dashboard. This means that if you prefer to make purchases in cash, or perhaps you have some money saved in cash at your home, you can add these sums into the ‘Offline Accounts’ feature to make sure that it is still accounted for.
Is Money Dashboard safe to use?
Money Dashboard has been operating for over 10 years- so you know that you’re in safe hands. They are also authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and registered provider on openbanking.org.uk
Money Dashboard is routinely inspected, tested and audited by qualified security and data specialists, and uses bank level security. By using the government backed open banking integration the log in process to connect your accounts is handled by your bank so you don’t have to worry about sharing your login details.
Top tips to get the most out of Money Dashboard
- Decide on your big, long term financial goals before you get started. This way, you have something to aim towards and can manage your money accordingly.
- Connect your accounts, check your ‘Balance After Bills’ and see how much money you could comfortably save each month.
- Track your spending throughout the month, and identify areas that you could cut back on.
- Set simple budgets for spending categories and keep tracking your progress against these throughout the month.
