Clarity Versus Mint
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- The Good
- Bill negotiation services
- Easy subscription management
- Discounts
- The Bad
- Only available on iOS
Clarity Money is featured as one of Apple’s 2017 “New Apps We Love” for a reason. It’s compact, but offers a lot of extras in personal finance. Not only do you get the basics of account tracking and budgeting, you also get help lowering your bills and negotiating with creditors.
- The Good
- Free to use with paid upgrade options
- Automatic syncing with all loaded accounts
- Weekly reports on spending and budget goals
- The Bad
- No reconciliation features
- Syncing issues may cause delays
- Few investment tools
The Mint app offers all of the same functionality as the web-based platform, giving you an easy tool to help with budgeting and saving. Using the tool that goes with you everywhere — your phone — you can track your spending, see when bills are due or when you might have overspent on something. As a personal finance app, Mint offers a solid list of features that work for most people.
- Cost
- Free
Clarity Money offers comprehensive financial services at the best price — free! There’s no cost to users, so how do they make money? It’s pretty simple. Like many personal finance apps, there are ads and referral fees they earn when you sign up for something through the app, but another revenue stream comes with their bill negotiation services. When they get you a lower rate, they take a commission on your savings. So if your telecom expenses drop by $30 a month, they take $10. You still save, and they monetize helping you save.
- Cost
- Free
You don’t get much better than free as a price point, and that’s the cost of using Mint. So, how does Mint make money? Several ways. There are suggested saving tools or financial options that pay Mint a referral fee when users sign up. Mint also collects broad statistical data, with no personal identification information, and sells it. You’ll also notice some ads. All of these generate revenue to help keep the service free for users.
- Features
- Bill negotiations
- Subscription management
- Budget tracking
- Expense reporting
- Account syncing
With Clarity Money, not only can you see all of your accounts through their platform, you can also build a budget, manage your monthly bills and cancel wasteful subscriptions. Have a magazine billing you that you don’t read or a monthly box service you no longer want? Let Clarity handle the cancellation quickly and easily.
- Features
- Account syncing
- Bill payment reminders
- Budget tracking
- Payment alerts
- Credit score tracking
For personal finance, Mint has a fairly comprehensive set of features that help you handle day-to-day transactions. You can see money as it comes in and as it goes out. You even get reminders when you have a bill due or past due. With most of your financial information readily accessible through a single platform, you can stay up-to-date quickly and easily.
- Account Integration
- Includes bank accounts, loans, credit cards and more
Clarity Money allows you to track almost all of your financial accounts through a single platform. It really excels with bill payment and expense tracking, as well as with managing your monthly bills. You’ll get reminders about due dates, notifications about changes and more, all through Clarity Money.
- Account Integration
- Works with most financial institutions
Once you set up your accounts through Mint, you enjoy automatic syncing. That means every time you swipe a card, you can see the transaction through your Mint app. You can even see your retirement accounts and track contributions. With banking, credit cards, retirement and bills in one place, you’ve got pretty much everything you need to assess your financial health and plan for the future.
- Budget Resources
- Tracks spending
- Monthly income tracking
Clarity offers individuals with a variable income, a way to monitor it month to month. Clarity also has a spending tracker, this tracker filters by week, month or year.
- Budget Resources
- Track spending
- Bill payment notifications
- Budget Templates
Mint makes budgeting easy with a lot of automatic features that take the tedium out of expense tracking. Once you set up Mint, it can give you quick reports about your current spending habits and make budget suggestions to help you stretch your funds.
Clarity: User Reviews
Mint: User Reviews
Clarity: Comments
Mint: Comments
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Clarity Money is unique in the world of personal finance management apps. Not only does it include the standard options of account tracking, expense management and budgeting, it also takes proactive steps to help you lower your debt burden.
Using Clarity Money, you can cancel a subscription at the touch of a button, no long wait times on the phone or dealing with delays while waiting for the cancellation to process. Instead, Clarity takes care of it for you.
How Does Clarity Money Work?
Like most personal finance apps, Clarity Money requires you to set up syncing between the app and your financial accounts. Once that is done, you gain access to a wealth of tools designed to help you take control of your spending. You’ll see a variety of reports and charts, giving you a visual of how you currently spend your money and suggestions on ways to save.
You might need to re-sync your account periodically, as financial institutions regularly update their security protocols. So, if your accounts stop syncing, you will need to troubleshoot them before you can continue using all of the Clarity Money features.
What Makes Clarity Money Stand Out?
Bill negotiation and subscription management are the two services that really make Clarity Money unique. By allowing you to quickly and easily cancel subscriptions, Clarity can help you get rid of small bills that can add up to a hefty sum at the end of the year.
They also act as a negotiator to help reduce the cost on monthly services you don’t want to cancel. According to Clarity, telecom is where they have the most success, so you could see your phone bill go down, all without spending a dime.
Common Clarity Money Reviews
Clarity Money is relatively new, so it doesn’t have as many reviews as the competition in this space. The reviews it does have tend to be positive, with the app store showing it at more than 4 stars, with nine ratings on the current version and a total of 748 ratings. Recent updates have met with approval from the marketplace, since the total app rating has improved with the latest release.
Is Clarity Money Right for You?
Before you choose a personal finance app, you might want to ask a few questions:
- Do I want to start saving?
- Could I use a discount on my monthly bills?
- What services do I actually need?
There are many personal finance apps out there, but few offer the complete set of services that come with Clarity Money. If you want to start saving, cutting your expenses is a great way to get there, particularly when it doesn’t mean changing your lifestyle. Other apps might give you savings tips, but Clarity Money can help deliver savings directly.
If you want to find ways to actually lower your costs without cutting services, Clarity Money is a good choice. Of course, it’s only available on iOS, so if you’re an Android user, it might not make sense to switch.
The Mint app offers a fairly comprehensive set of personal finance tools that can help you get your spending under control. From easy budget templates to near-instant tracking, you can see your financial health at your fingertips.
How Does Mint Work
Using Mint is pretty simple. All you do is sign up for a free account, then link your existing financial accounts and get started. The app will automatically sync with your accounts and start generating reports about your spending.
You can set up budgets, add bill pay and more.
What Makes Mint Great?
Using Mint takes the guesswork out of budgeting. You don’t need to go home and track all of your receipts. In fact, you don’t need to keep your receipts at all. Instead, you can see your spending as it happens. That makes following your budget a much more streamlined process.
Common Mint Reviews
Professionals recommend the Mint app for its easy-to-use interface and feature-rich environment. It routinely scores between 4 and 5 stars on review sites because it offers so much at such an affordable price — free.
Users give Mint praise for simplified money management. The only complaints you generally see involve add-on feature requests like bi-monthly budgeting or percentage of income budgets.
Is Mint Right for You?
Mint offers the right mix of easy-to-use features for most consumers. However, it might not be the best choice for people with a very complex financial portfolio. For example, there are certainly options for managing investment portfolios that offer more control and reporting features. It is also not the best tool to track real estate investments or self-employed income. For the vast majority of users, though, it does several things very well, such as:
- Building a budget quickly and easily
- Seeing your spending habits
- Helping you save more
If those are your priorities, then Mint is a good choice. It has all of the basic finance tools you could want, along with simplified options for things like investing.
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