2025 is here, and you may have drawn up some New Year’s Resolutions to improve yourself. Living a healthier lifestyle is usually at the top of the list, while saving money is second. Money management is the best New Year’s Resolution to have on your list, especially with how the economy, while it’s grown strong paper, hasn’t boded well for anyone over the last few years because wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. No matter where you are on your financial journey, these apps will help you manage your money better, save money for any important purchase you want to make in the future, and invest in the stock market so that your wealth can grow for years to come. Here are the best money-saving and investing apps you can use in 2025 (and beyond) for both Android and iOS.
If you’re interested in money-transfer apps or moneymaking apps, we also have separate guides on those subjects.
Credit Karma
Credit Karma is a master of two things: monitoring your credit score and helping you save money any way it can. The last part is especially true, as Intuit, the company that is also home to Quickbooks and TurboTax, took the Mint app offline on March 23, 2024, and brought some of its features to Credit Karma. The Mint website still exists (somehow), but you’ll lose access to your Mint profile once you move your financial account data over to the credit score monitoring site.
In addition to checking your credit score as usual (with no impact on your credit score whatsoever after the fact), Credit Karma now lets you monitor your categorized transactions — provided you connect your bank accounts to the app — track your net worth, and helps you figure out where you can save money while considering important purchases. It also teaches you how you can build up your credit and your savings all at once, improve your credit score, and view your assets, debts, and investments so you can see where you can improve.
The app will also alert you when your credit score has changed, allowing you to see what affected your score and get tips on building it back up if it has decreased. If your credit score is low, you can boost it by 21 points in three days on average.
Chime
Chime isn’t simply a money-saving app, but also a mobile banking app that does more to help you save than apps from other digital banks. You can sign up for an account for free, and once you’re set up you’ll receive a Visa debit card, a checking account, and an optional savings account. So far, so normal, but what sets Chime apart from the crowd is that it introduces a range of features that will empower you to save more money.
Most notably, it includes an automatic savings feature, which automatically sends 10% of your salary to your savings account each month. It also includes an option to round up your purchases to the nearest dollar, so that you can send the difference to your savings. On top of this, you can even get a fee-free overdraft of up to $200, as well as the ability to receive your salary two days early in some cases.
Again, Chime is very well designed as an app and easy to use. It’s free to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Rocket Money
Rocket Money is considered one of the best personal finance apps on the market because of its ability to manage your subscriptions. By “manage your subscriptions,” we mean it can help you cancel your subscriptions en masse, especially subscriptions to streaming services you forgot you had because you haven’t used them for months, if not years. How that works is it helps track down the streaming services tied to your credit card and cancels your forgotten subscriptions with just a few button taps, saving you the time to cancel them on the respective websites of each service.
In addition to canceling your long-forgotten subscriptions to Max and Paramount+, Rocket Money acts as a personal broker that can negotiate with cable, internet, and phone companies on your behalf to get more affordable rates on your existing bills. That can be incredibly helpful if you’re living on a tight budget.
Speaking of budgets, Rocket Money also helps you set the amount of money you want to put into your savings every month, monitor events that impact your credit score, create a monthly budget that fits your needs, and tracks your expenses by category so you can hold yourself accountable and reach whatever financial goals you set for yourself. The app can cancel your subscriptions, but you still need to subscribe to the app to access that service and more. Subscriptions start at $3 a month.
Acorns
Acorns was founded in 2012 and launched on iOS and Android in 2014. Since then, it has served as one of the largest leaps forward in bringing saving and investing within reach for millions of Americans across all income and finance education spectrums. The kernel of an idea that gave Acorns its start was passively saving money by rounding up your purchases to the nearest dollar and setting those amounts aside for a rainy day.
Today, Acorns allows you to take this spare change and invest it in the stock market in several different accounts, as well as investing some of that change in Bitcoin. “Acorns Invest” offers taxable investment accounts, “Acorns Later” offers Traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, and SEP IRAs, while “Acorns Early” offers UTMA/UGMA accounts for your children to get a head start on saving. In each of these accounts, Acorns will allow you to choose your level of risk tolerance for investing in the stock market. These options range from “conservative” to “aggressive” with the former being heavy in bonds and the latter being 100% equities exposure.
No matter your path, Acorns is a powerful tool to get started with saving and investing, even if it’s just with your spare change. No amount is too small to start with, and it’s never too early to start.
Acorns is free to download, but charges for subscriptions at $3, $6, or $12 per month for Bronze, Silver, and Gold accounts.
You Need a Budget
You need a budget, so why not download the You Need a Budget (YNAB) app? This is another great money-saving app that lets you track all of your accounts and transactions in a single place, enabling you to save money in the process. It lets users set their financial goals and also offers helpful estimations of when they’ll reach them, assuming that they follow the given budgeting advice. It also provides regular trend reports on your spending that help you track just how well you’re doing in saving money.
One welcome addition that YNAB brings is that it grants users the right to join free online budgeting workshops. This really rounds out the advice the app provides, giving users a greater knowledge of how to budget and save money.
YNAB is free to download from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. However, it charges for a monthly subscription once the 30-day free trial is over, beginning from $15 a month or $109 a year. Despite this expense, it claims that new users save $600 on average in the first two months and $6,000 in the first year.
