EveryDollar: Personal Budget Ratings and Reviews

The Apple of Budgeting Apps - Keep it simple

I’ve been using EveryDollar since they first came out with it years ago. I’m a big fan. We used to manually enter every transaction in the free version, but since life has gotten crazier with three young kids and growing responsibilities my wife and I just opted for the premium version. I will say before we made this change I tried three other popular budgeting apps and almost switched, but came back to EveryDollar because of the simplicity. However features missing that I’ve seen on other apps that would take this one to the next level are: 1. In the sinking funds, it would be super helpful if you guys added the back end math so users can put in the needed amount, the date needed, and the app could spit out how much you need to save per month to get there. YNAB does this and it was super helpful for things like annual fitness app payment, or EveryDollar subscriptions, etc. I’m thankful you have the sinking funds. But adding this additional functionality would be super helpful. 2. A reoccurring expense calendar. Monarch has this and it really helps at the beginning of the month when your updating your budget categories to make sure you don’t miss something like a life insurance payment, car insurance, or subscription, etc. Thanks for listening and for a great budgeting app!

Good tool, some flaws

I do like this app and it has helped me keep track of my spending much better than I had been. It also shows me how much I am really spending on items that I can cut back on, like eating out. Before, I really didn't realize how much we were spending and now I can see it add up as the month goes on. I like being able to split transactions into different categories to track each cost. But the help section is lacking and there was no real tutorial that I saw so I kind of had to learn as I went. The one thing I still can not get an answer to is the income. I can put in a planned amount but sometimes our income is more or less. When I put the actual received amount in as a transaction, it doesn't change my overall monthly amount. So it doesn't account for the over/under. This may be user error, but I've tried everything to get it to work properly and it won't. So I just change the planned amount to what we get paid. Which is fine, although the next month's budget shows the wrong amounts as planned income and I have to change, and it is not at all what the help section says should happen. It seems like the plus version would do it for me, but I am not paying $120 a year for an app to help me budget and save money. And honestly, I think that is shady of Dave Ramsey to even do that considering he preaches about cutting out unnecessary expenses. I'd give this app 4 stars but the lacking help section and fee for everydollar plus makes it lose at least 1 star.

Developer Response ,

Sorry you've had so many issues with EveryDollar! We have a help center with over 130 articles and several tutorials, as well as a Customer Success team here to help walk people through their budgets. The income question you have is a very simple one to answer. Email help@everydollar.com so we can go into details on what you need to do and help with any other questions you have.

This app is by far the best budgeting tool out there.

This app and corresponding desktop interface is by far the best out there. It’s very customizable.
I’ve never been good at budgeting because I get paid bi-weekly and I have a variable income. I also travel unexpectedly for my job which throws off my budget by adding reimbursable expenses throughout the month. Through the help and suggestions of the everydollar support staff, I know now how to work this app as an effective tool with all those budgeting variables.

You work your current month budget with the paychecks from the previous month. Then I keep a “hill and vallley” account with just enough to cover any short months where my checks may not cover expenses. So far I haven’t had to use that account. For the travel expenses, I created an expense and income category of reimbursable expenses. I know how much I get per day for meals while traveling and I simply add that to the reimbursable lines as the month/travel has gone on. This has been a huge money saver for me. I’m controlling every aspect of my finances by budgeting. It’s the foundation for everything I’m doing with my money. And I highly recommend spending the $120 for financial peace university which as of now includes everydollar plus for a year. Worth. Every. Penny. (And no I don’t work for Dave Ramsey but it’s a great program for getting out of debt)

Can’t sync my bank

I’ve had this app for about two years now. I used it very little at first, but it worked very well at the time: my bank connected and I tracked all my expenses very successfully. Unfortunately I stopped using the app, and my bank connection terminated automatically.
This month I decided I am going to use the app religiously and went in to set up my budget and re-sync my checking account. No luck. According to the technical support at EveryDollar, my bank has changed their security protocol and additional information is required before they will allow me to link EveryDollar to my bank account. No indication what this additional information is or how to enter it.
Tech-support has indicated that they will continue to try and get my bank to link but in the meantime, they suggested that I do the transaction deductions from my budget manually. In my mind, this defeats the entire purpose of the EveryDollar app. I want something that is done a
with a few clicks not something that I have to do manually.
With the enhanced security protocols that most banks have, I’m disappointed that Ramsey Solutions hasn’t anticipated this and put in place procedures to comply. But I can’t say that it’s entirely their fault. I have canceled my auto renew for the EveryDollar app. I’m looking for another app that will do the same thing, but will connect with my current bank. If I’m not successful, I guess I go back to the old envelope plan.

Developer Response ,

So sorry that there is a change with your banks security settings preventing you from connecting right now. Feel free to check back with our support team in the future to see if the status has changed with your particular bank. You can contact our team at help.everydollar.com!

Cheaper than marriage counseling & lifesaving

This app is a great tool in so many ways. It works well, allows me to sync to our bank and categorize every transaction.
It makes your money REAL.
In my home where I’m on a different financial planet than my husband is, it has saved loads of arguing and playing “the blame game” about who spent what where. If one of us has spent over our allotted amounts it’s simple to see and stops the argument before it starts.
We’ve sat in untold counseling sessions and money has always been a huge issue. This app has helped remedy more problems than any counseling ever did. When I can simply say “we are $400 over budget, spending needs to stop” and husband starts freaking out on me asking why; I get to reply “see line 9 where you bought truck parts and line 8 where you stopped at the gas station all week?” Then it spares me having to defend my $100 of budgeted “fun money”
I put all our receipts into this app with a note attached to what the item was. Believe me when I say this has saved me so much stress and taken so much burden off of me being able to enjoy my little bit of “mad money” and not be made to feel guilty about it or have it thrown up in my face. After 32 years of arguing about money I have a tool to change the game. Worth every cent.

Life Changing!

I started using the Free Version of the Every Dollar app as a part of my New Years Resolution to be better at budgeting. During Covid I really got into budgeting using the envelope method and a budgeting journal which was a great start, but not easy since my pay checks and bills are auto-payments. As a teacher who owns her house and car, I use most of my paycheck every month, so my goal was to build up some cushion in my checking account and extra money in savings. One of my coworkers told me about Every Dollar, and I jumped into it. I am very strict about using it and update it almost daily. I would say it is a digital envelope method. You create your categories which you can set up as a set amount every month that starts over or as a fund which builds up on the money you don’t spend. For example, I have a gas budget that starts fresh every month and is a set amount, but a fun money budget that builds up whatever I don’t spend! It is so easy to use and will roll over your categories each month. I use the free version which is exactly what I need, but if you don’t want to update it yourself daily like me you can get the premium version which offers more.

Like always, they keep changing the UI

I’ve used EveryDollar for years now, long enough to hit the historical data limit a few times over. I’ve embraced and relied upon it for a large part of my professional life now. My big area of opportunity for the Ramsey+ team is to stop modifying the way the app works. Modern software product and deb teams can’t seem to wrap their heads around the “if it ain’t broke” principle. Multiple times now they’ve made updates to the UI to make it more modern and visually striking, and they keep either breaking functionality or introducing a new process to those of us with muscle memory. Currently, I can’t tell if it’s a bug or a feature, but I can no longer see the progress bar on spending categories as I go. I also get an auto capitalization on the second word when hitting the space bar in a business name without that representing to me graphically. I can’t tell you how annoying that is that the app knows I’ve got a space and the next letter will be a cap but I the user don’t know that. Things like that have plagued this app over the last year or two. I’m starting to wonder at what point they’ll just hate the whole thing behind the monthly fee. You gotta make money, I get it; but honestly you could have just left the rest of us the version from 2 years ago with no further updates released and we’d all be fine.

Developer Response ,

Hey Coal, We do have bigger goals of reaching and helping more users than we were able to get with the previous version. So we moved to a new tech stack to help us iterate faster into an app that will do more than just budgeting. The progress bars disappearing are a bug that we've fixed and are rolling out currently. If you can email me we'll document the auto cap issue you called out and see if we can get that knocked out quickly. Bobby.Gibson@RamseySolutions.com

I was hoping to replace Mint but this is terrible

I watch the shows and listen to the podcasts so I was optimistic and more than willing to spend the money on the app. It’s very disappointing that an app we’re paying for is not nearly as good as Mint was and it Mint free. Adding and syncing accounts was smooth and easy but organizing transactions is where this app fails and it’s what 99% of users will be doing the majority of the they’re in the app. If you have a transaction that occurred in March, before you assign it to a budget category you have to make sure you’re in March’s budget. For example if you log in any time in April the app defaults to the current month’s budget as expected, so April in this case. If you're going through your transactions to assign them a category, the app will assign any transactions you assign that day to the current month’s budget regardless of the date of the transaction. So for this example, you log on April 1st and bought gas on March 31st, that transaction will default to April’s budget. This is very inconvenient for what is probably the most-used function of the app. The fix their support provides is to delete the transaction from the current month’s budget, switch over to the previous month’s budget, and reassign the transaction. If you login once a week and forget to change the month, expect to do the above steps 10-15 times every month depending on how many transactions you have each week.

Please fix this.

Developer Response ,

Hey there! That's correct. Transactions can be assigned to any month so as a best practice, double-check you're in the intended month before tracking transactions. If many transactions have been tracked to an incorrect month by mistake, you may want to consider clicking Reset Budget - “Untrack all my transactions and pull over last month’s budget items” to make bulk edits and then track them again. Thanks for your feedback!

I don’t get it

It seems like it only works if you stay on budget. If you don’t, then your projected budget means nothing. Your “safe to spend” means nothing. What is the point of connecting to my bank if you cannot use the information from it to adjust accordingly? There isn’t anywhere in the app where I can look and see anything in real time. Let’s say I overspend on groceries. Cool, you can see a negative -$244 in red in the groceries budget section. Does it take that information and adjust your paycheck planning? No. I don’t know what to do with the information it gives me because I feel like it isn’t helpful. What does it matter if I can see that I’ve overspent in each individual section if I cannot see how that affects my upcoming budgets? I want to know that by overspending in groceries I now don’t have enough projected income to pay my phone bill. I want to see after sorting all the transactions into their correct category how that changes my paycheck planning. It showed this month that I was at a low risk of overspending. In reality I barely have enough to pay rent. The paycheck planning shows “the me I wish I was” and not “the me I am right now”. So I can’t trust it, like at all. When I do the calculations by hand, I can see that very easily. I just take the amount in my bank account and subtract the bills and budgets coming up this month. Why is that not possible?

Developer Response ,

We recommending adjusting as you go in EveryDollar. By this I mean if you overspend in a particular budget item by $244 then we recommend you increase your Planned column by $244 and then you will have to pull back and decrease the Planned amounts for another budget item(s) by $244 at the same time to balance the overall budget out. The same applies if you receive some extra income during the month that you did not expect, you would then increase the Planned amount for the income line item where it applies or you would just create a new budget item if it was new income that you received. You will then see these updates in the Paycheck Planning section. Definitely reach out to our team if you have more specific questions regarding anything else.

Easy but incomplete and pricey

I love the design and ease of use to track transactions. But that’s where it ends… The math didn’t work out many times between “planned” expense, “spent” and “remaining”. No idea why. I was never able to connect to two of three banks I use. I love to run reports and see all of the transactions in a particular catagory, or merchant. This app does not do that, only the dollar amount. Finally, I like to see my transactions in a single account at one time. No can do. I did get a refund through Apple, thankfully on the 30th day after purchase. That’s the time limit. Not sure why it’s $80/yr, but I’d pay if it worked. Update: I received a developer response, addressing my concern about bank connectivity. Since I was forced to leave Mint and find another budgeting tool, I decided to use the recommendation from the app developer and try again. I went through their recommendations, and did everything suggested. When none of that worked, and I finally figured out how to send the developer an email in regards to my problem, I never received a response. As of today, there is still one bank I cannot connect to, and I’ve noticed more than one bug that makes using this app frustrating. The problem is, I don’t know what other tool to use that would replacement Mint. I would take a few ads in Mint over EveryDollar any day.

Update 2: Moved to Monarch. Awesome app

Developer Response ,

Get in touch with our team and view helpful articles on our Help Center at help.everydollar.com. Our Customer Success team can assist with any challenges that are being faced at this time. There is also an article on the differences between "Planned", "Spent", and "Remaining" tabs in the mobile app and on the computer version of EveryDollar at everydollar.com.