LearnVest.com began as a personal finance education website for women. These days, it's less gender-specific, and much more interactive, especially if you download the company's free iPhone app (also available for Android), which is simply called LearnVest. The LearnVest app is a well-designed, comprehensive solution for monitoring your money, creating budgets, prioritizing your financial goals, and educating yourself about personal finance. It's easy to use largely because it connects directly to your accounts—savings, checking, credit cards, investment, you name it—and automatically pulls every line item of your income and expense history.
The LearnVest app is extremely similar to the Mint mobile app, which is our Editors' Choice. One difference is that Mint offers a few features that LearnVest omits, which are absolutely essential for managing multi-person finances. These include (1) the ability to exclude a transaction from your accounting and (2) to split an expense. I'll explain in more detail below how those features work, but the point is, LearnVest is almost as good as Mint, just not quite.
Setting Up LearnVest
When you download and install LearnVest on your iPhone, the app will walk you through the setup process quickly. It could take anywhere from two to 15 minutes, depending on how many financial accounts you have and how much customization you want.
Early in the setup process, LearnVest tells you to create a passcode, which is a good thing. Even though none of your bank account information is directly stored on the app, you should still protect all the data regarding your net worth, spending habits, and related information.
You start by selecting up to three financial topics of interest from a short list. They include: Budget Better, Buy a House, Retire, Deal With Loans, Invest Wisely, Pay Off Credit Cards, Save More, and Earn More. You'll also see a quick house ad asking if you'd like to set up an appointment to speak with a LearnVest advisor. LearnVest makes its money through financial planning advisement, but you don't have to partake in it to use the free app.
Now to the meaty part: You have to authenticate the app to access data from your online financial accounts. It's all secure, and as I mentioned, none of your account information is stored in the app directly. If you're hyper secure and don't want to give a personal finance app direct access to your accounts, there are alternatives, including Dollarbird and Checkbook. Those two apps require manual entry and are less convenient to use. But if you really want a personal finance app that's totally disconnected from your actual bank accounts, they are decent options.
Like Mint, LearnVest finds all your transactions and account balances, both current and historical up to three months back, to give you a picture of your net worth as well as insights into where you typically spend your money.
Also similar to Mint, LearnVest automatically classifies the transactions into categories such as Groceries, Bills, Restaurants and Bars, Personal Care, and so forth. If it can't make a good guess as to the correct category, it leaves it unclassified. You then have the opportunity to go through the list, item by item, and classify them all correctly.
One annoyance with classifying expenses is that LearnVest doesn't learn from its mistakes. If I correct an expense made at Parrot Coffee from Restaurant and Bars to Groceries, I want LearnVest to offer to make the same change to all other transactions made at the same establishment. If LearnVest sees $800 incoming on the same day every month that it wrongly classifies as income, and I correct it to Transfer, I want it to learn to correctly classify it as such in the future. Mint doesn't offer to automatically reclassify similar transactions either. To the best of my knowledge, no mobile personal financial app does this yet.
Digging In
As you dig into your spending and earnings, you can see charts and graphs showing how much money you spend in different categories and what percent of your total spending any given category comprises. LearnVest lays out all this information in very easy-to-read formats.
I'd like to see LearnVest get some of the nitty-gritty details right because as it stands, there are two features missing that I think are important. One is the ability to exclude a transaction from your accounting. Let's say I'm shopping with my imaginary daughter, and she wants to buy an item. I tell her she has to pay for it herself. I buy it with my credit card, and she gives me cash. It's a zero-sum transaction for me, but LearnVest records it as a deficit. I could balance the transaction by adding a manual cash income line item (which you can do for expenses, too), but it would be simpler to just exclude it. Mint gives you that option, but LearnVest does not.
Mint also gives you the ability to split a transaction. Say I withdraw $100 from the ATM, and $60 goes to dinner at a restaurant, but $40 goes to gas for my imaginary car. To keep track of my budgeting accurately, I would want to split that ATM transaction and record the two amounts separately. You can't do that in the LearnVest mobile app, although you can if you log into the LearnVest website, where all your mobile information is also available. Splits are especially common in multi-member households.
Extras
LearnVest lets you set budgets for different spending categories, as I mentioned, as well as create priorities. Priorities could be saving for a home renovation, paying off debt, saving more for retirement, or whatever else. It's a rather simple tool. You write down your goal, decide which account you'll use to help you reach that goal, set a date, and let LearnVest figure out how much you need to save per month while taking into account how much money you already have toward that end.
LearnVest doesn't have bill-pay reminders, but an app called Check was created just for that purpose, and seeing as it's also free, there's no reason not to use it in addition to LearnVest (or Mint for that matter).
LearnVest's roots are in education about personal finance, so the app contains a reading section where you can brush up on all your economic interests. These are straightforward articles with basic explanations and principles of personal finance. You might read about how to get started investing, for example, or how to get out of credit card debt.
For deeper and more personalized guidance, you can set up an appointment through the app to speak with a live advisor on the phone. Sure, you'll probably face some upselling for LearnVest's full financial services, but the prompt to make that phone call isn't pushy, which I like.
A Real Competitor to Mint
LearnVest's mobile app is the first real competitor to Mint I've tested, though it doesn't quite nudge Mint from its Editors' Choice perch because Mint adds a few key features that LearnVest doesn't yet have. It's still a very good personal finance and budgeting app, with a great design, an intuitive interface, and helpful reading material.
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