Pluto is a free personal finance app that’s made for the new generation of budgeters: college students. It is designed by students with a focus on their personal spending habits. This service will mainly focus on setting realistic goals and making your interaction with money as fun and relevant as possible.
Read below for more information on what they have to offer.
Pluto 101
If you don’t like traditional budgeting apps with cash flow terminology and spending graphs. Then, you should consider Pluto, they help you make your financial dreams come true. This app will enable you to set your own savings challenges, so you can stay motivated when you reach your small, realistic targets.
If you want to spend less on a specific thing a week, or save money to go somewhere eventful. Then, you’ll be able to set and track goals big or small to see your progress from week to week.
Additionally, Pluto has received lots of attention from the media such as:
- CNN Money. A recommended app “to keep tabs on expenses”
- PT Money. One of “The Best Personal Finance Software for Taming Your Budget (2019)”
- Stacking Benjamins (#1 personal finance podcast by Kiplinger). “This whole idea of gamifying your goal is pretty exciting.”
- Budgets Are Sexy. “12 New Financial Companies to Watch Out For”
Pluto Features
This is not your typical run-of-the-mill money app. Pluto features special “Spend Less” challenges, behavioral nudges, and smart notifications to help you save better. Furthermore, to make things sound even better, this service is completely free to use.
Automatic Tracking & Categorization
Pluto will allow you to securely connect to more than 10,000 financial institutions in the U.S. Link to your various accounts and let the app automatically track, analyze, and categorize your transactions.
Search Transactions Easily
If you need to find a specific transaction, you can search for it by bank account, merchant name, or category (Chase, Lyft, or Fast food).
Relevant Savings Goals
To save successfully, you have to be motivated. To get motivated, you need to set highly desirable short and mid term savings goals. In other words, picking a target that’s perfect for you, not one that your parents or society want for you. Be honest, how much do you really care about retirement savings when you’re still in college?
Pluto will help you with your needs, wants, and life obligations (like paying off student loans).
Personal Insights
This perk will enable you to learn about your finances and habits in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. Additionally, you’ll receive snapshot overviews that you can go further into detail only if you want to.
Personal Insights combined with Spending Challenges, so you can get your statistics paired with actionable suggestions to help you get to where you want to be financially.
Spending Challenges
Pluto gets the numbers and graphs in your Personal Insights, then tells you what you need to do to reach your goals. This is all based on your personal finances, step by step. These actionable steps are called “Spend Less” challenges.
The idea behind this is to spend less where you can so you can reach your goals faster. For example, you can spend less than your weekly average on buying coffee and reward yourself by savings what you would spend on a vacation instead.
Peer Insights
With this feature, it will let you anonymously see how your finances are compared to other peers, grouped by criteria like: age, income, relationship status, and college campus.
The app will even let you mess around with search terms to see how to do against different demographics.
Smart Alerts
Behavioral Nudges are notifications that try to help you stay on track with your spending challenges. This way you can save more for your objectives.
You’ll receive alerts when new transactions post, which can help you catch fraudulent activity.
Limitations
This service will not offer robust analytics capabilities. However, since Pluto is trying to keep it easy and relevant for you, this isn’t necessary. If you want more, check out Mint or Personal Capital for more features.
 |
 |
Conclusion
With this free mobile app, you’ll be able to reach your financial objectives with easy challenges based on your spending habits and smart reminders. This is a great choice to consider if you want to save money but need extra help and support to do so. Overall, when you’re gamifying small goals into weekly challenges, Pluto will help you make your financial resolutions and stick to them.
