Ideal Budgeting App Features

What would your ideal budgeting app look like? No idea is too crazy! As per title, I’m curious to know what features you’d want to use that don’t exist yet or aren’t commonly available. I’ll start: I would want to be able to compare myself to the general population of the same age to see if my financial standing is good or if I need to save more.

My Schwab 401k account has that feature - you can compare your 401k savings total amount as well as savings rate to your peers (similar age, similar income).

Oh that’s really cool! Does it go by city or it’s a generalized number?

By state as well as just showing your place in percentiles as an individual.

Some of the things I want to be able to do in my current app that I can’t:

  1. Move expenses from one month to another to show the expense occurring when I want. Mostly for travel purposes, I recently bought flights for a trip in August, and I would rather the expense show for my budget in August.
  2. Amortize expenses across months. Just bought new car insurance; they give you a discount if you pay for the whole year at once, but now it’s throwing off my budgeting as it’s a big time expense.
  3. If I can’t directly connect a bank account, I want to be able to input pertinent details like interest rate and balance to estimate a growing value on its own, saving me from frequent manual updates.
  4. Full functionality across devices—phone, PC, tablet. I want the same experience no matter where I log in.
  5. Split a savings account into multiple goals (emergency fund, travel, down payment, etc.) with a prioritization system.
  6. Identify companies offering free subscription services through partnerships. It would be great to know what companies cover what services to evaluate the best deals.

Well, right now mine is a notebook because I don’t like how much personal data there is to access on such apps, especially if you’re connecting accounts to track spending. I prefer manual input. I break down annual or semi-annual expenses into monthly savings.

Also, having the ability to share some info with a budgeting partner without necessarily sharing everything would be nice. My partner knows my finances, but I don’t think both names need to be on everything. A cooperative budgeting app could really facilitate this.