The world's best finance/money management apps for global citizens đź’¸

Hey guys! I figured it would be useful to crowdsource a “master list” of the top fintech services and apps that help you manage your personal finances (across financial institutions, countries, etc).

I know many of us have income and expenses across several currencies, and across borders or at least across institutions. That is definitely the case for me, personally. If it wasn’t for a suite of very useful apps and services, that complexity would be a lot harder to manage.

I propose the following categories, but please suggest others in case I missed anything useful: Bill tracking/payment, person-to-person payments, international money transfer, budgeting/personal finance apps, credit score optimization, and saving apps.

Although there are some banks or bank-like products that offer some of these features (e.g. Simple, N26, Monzo, etc), I think we should leave them out of this list—at least as long as they support multiple currencies and countries.

Budgeting and general personal finance apps :bar_chart:

  • Mint (US)—connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts to get a full overview over your finances. Recently removed their Bill Pay feature.

  • Empower (US)—quite similar to Mint. One useful feature is that you can designate a percentage of your salary payments that will automatically be transferred to a savings or investment account in any US financial institution. Useful to force yourself to save, build up a rainy day fund, or make sure you have enough cash for future tax bills.

  • Tink (SE)—Useful budgeting and personal finance app where you can connect all your Swedish financial accounts in one app.

Bill tracking and payment :spiral_calendar:

  • Debitize (US)—connect all your credit cards, and Debitize will withdraw what you spend from your checking account, daily. Then it will automatically pay off your credit card balances either weekly or monthly. Get the perks of using credit cards, without ending in debt.

  • Prism (US)—track and pay all your US bills (from credit cards to utilities) in one user friendly app, all for free.

  • Roger.ai (DK)—will allow you to pay all your Danish bills (or certain international ones, if you have a premium account) using a debit or credit card, free of charge. They even support payment with international (incl. US) credit cards, so if you have left Denmark you now have a way to pay Danish bills without a local bank account.

  • Payr (NO)—Similar to Roger.ai, but for the Norwegian market. They only support payment with Nordic credit and debit cards, however.

Person-to-person payments :dancing_men:

  • PayPal (Global)—Hardly needs any introduction. Works well globally, but often high fees—especially when converting currencies.

  • Venmo (US)—Banks suck for P2P payments in the US, which is why an app like Venmo has become very popular in recent years. Send payments instantly to friends in the US using your debit card.

  • MobilePay (DK, FI)—P2P and in-store payments with your phone.

  • Vipps (NO)—P2P and in-store payments with your phone.

  • Verse (EU)—Very similar to Venmo, but for users with a phone number and bank account from the EU. No currency conversion fee.

International money transfer and virtual bank accounts :money_with_wings:

  • TransferWise (Global-ish, 46 currencies supported)—extremely good value international money transfers (often 0.5% fee), plus local “bank accounts” (aka Borderless accounts) in a handful of useful countries.

  • Revolut (EU/EEA/Switzerland, soon US, Asia++)—While they also offer a decent multi-currency prepaid card, what I personally use Revolut the most for is transferring money and paying bills across currencies, free of charge. Also useful for paying other Revolut users.

  • Payoneer (Global)—Useful for receiving money via local bank transfer in certain countries, and transferring it to your own bank account elsewhere. Somewhat high fees. If you qualify, TransferWise Borderless is better and cheaper.

Credit score optimization :credit_card:

  • Credit Karma (US)—keep track of your credit score for free.

Smart Savings :bank:

  • Qapital (US)—set up various saving goals and rules (e.g. simple round up rules, percentage of income rules, or even your own IFTTT recipes). Perfect for building up a rainy day fund or saving for a larger purchase, without really noticing that you’re saving a little bit every day.

  • Digit (US)—similar to Qapital, but they provide some “cashback”—essentially interest—on your deposits. But since they also charge a monthly fee, you will only break even if you keep more than $3600 in your Digit account on average.

Other :woman_shrugging:

  • Curve (EU/EEA, but works with cards worldwide)—The perfect product for those who have lots of different debit and credit cards around—maybe even from different countries. With the Curve card, you have all your cards with you at all times. Just select which card to charge in the app. It can even help you save on FX fees if your bank charges you for spending in different currencies. If you charge something to the wrong card, you can “travel back in time” and move the payment to the correct card after the fact. You can even withdraw money from a credit card at an ATM without being charged a fee, even though your bank normally charges for that. And all this for free!

The list of apps that I use is pretty US and EU heavy, since that’s where I have most of my bank accounts. So let me know if you know any other apps worth mentioning!

So, which apps do you use to manage your finances? Let me know below and I’ll update this post!

3 Likes

How do you use Curve from outside the EU? The app somehow detected my phone wasn’t in Asia and wouldn’t even let me login.

Were you trying to sign up or log into your existing account?

I’ve never had any issues using it outside the EU at least, but I do think I was in the EU when I signed up.

What about LeuPay?

I love this one Empower Personal Wealth | Empower

And this new comer is really interesting for US people : https://www.robinhood.com
free Broklerage account and cash management.

www.comparetransfer.com to compare international payments. Usually you can pay less than using TransferWise.

1 Like

I’m looking for a platform similar to Personal Capital that facilitates international banks/pensions etc. Assuming it doesn’t exist due to privacy laws but worth an ask :slight_smile:

Does anyone know a Payoneer alternative which gives you an ACH wiring account with your name as recipient? I want to withdraw USD from my intl. paypal account.

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Transferwise

Doesn’t work unfortunately. There payee is Transferwise and not the account holder

My (personal) TW USD account is definitely in my own name and I also have it linked to my Canadian Paypal account. I set it up years ago though and haven’t really used it recently so maybe things changed in the meantime.

Interesting. I am EU citizen, so it’s different for us I guess

I’m also EU resident, and the USD Borderless account is definitely in my own name, and have been for at least a couple years.

Anyway, that doesn’t matter as TW accounts don’t work well with PayPal at the moment—the exception being if you connected it at least 1-2 years ago (the first one I connected still works fine to this day). If you connect it now it is likely to only work for the first transfer, then they PayPal will block the account and ask you to add another. At least that has been my experience. I guess they started doing some sort of verification as part of the first transfer, which they didn’t do before.

Hopefully this may change once TransferWise Borderless starts supporting ACH debit in the US.

Alos, typically for ACH transfers there’s no verification that the account is in the name you claim it is. In my experience you can connect an external bank account that’s in another name than your PayPal account without any problem.

Note that my experience is connecting US PayPal with TransferWise, not an international PP account. However, it should work similarly.

Not sure how much money you’re trying to free from PayPal, but if it’s a lot you may consider opening a US LLC (will cost you a couple hundred $) and open a Mercury account connect that to your PayPal account.

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I’m actually also an EU citizen :slight_smile:

Indeed my Transferwise-Paypal connection was established ~2 years ago so that’s probably why it worked for me.

Also in the meantime I was able to open a US bank account so that’s what I use now to transfer USD out from Paypal.

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Hi Guys,

Just a quick question. If you were to buy investments via Derigo, do you need to pay any taxes. For example, As a DN or PT we tend to move around a bit. If you open a derigo account in Holland, then move to Portugal, would it get messy?

Pardon my ignorance, I’m a complete newbie with investing.

Nice list :+1:t6::+1:t6::+1:t6::+1:t6::+1:t6::+1:t6: