Money management is an important life skill that helps you feel financially secure and healthy. Managing your money effectively entails saving, knowing your financial responsibilities, financial planning for life events, retirement planning, banking, and of course, making a budget.
Budgeting isn’t as easy as it looks – many Canadians struggle with budgeting, and only half of Canadians report even having a budget. Luckily, there are many budgeting apps and tools that can help you create and stick to your budget. In fact, digital tools are the most common form of keeping a budget. Wally is one of these digital budgeting apps – keep reading to see if it’s the right one for you.
What Is Wally?
Wally is an app that launched in 2014 that helps people manage their money. The app is available in over 70 countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, China and India.
How Does Wally Work?
Wally lets you sync your bank account to the app, which helps you track all of your finances in one place. You can add multiple bank accounts, credit cards and loans into Wally, as well as all receipts for your expenses. The app lets you access your balance in real-time, and it generates spending insights based on your activity and transactions.
The app allows you to set budget and savings targets, while informing you on your remaining spending money, and analyzing your spending to help you understand your financial behaviour.
Another cool feature from Wally is that you can manage joint accounts with your partner, family, or business associate. Both of you can add payments and access the account info through the app.
Wally App Features
Wally offers many features to help you manage your money:
Get A Head Start On Your Savings
Wally helps you achieve your savings goals by offering flexible, trackable budgets. You can adjust your budget constraints and periods as needed to help you meet certain goals. Additionally, you can budget by category to see how much money you spend on entertainment, travel, home expenses, and more. Wally also lets you know when you’re over, under, or on budget, making it easy to track your progress.
Take Control Of Your Finances
Wally helps you achieve financial health and security by helping you manage your finances better. The app’s unique spending insights helps you understand your spending habits and cash flow patterns. The app’s highlights of your overall financial situation include your spending, budget, and upcoming expenses – this helps you know your exact financial scenario at any time, giving you an overall snapshot of your finances. Finally, the app offers increased accountability by showing updated account balances and transaction updates.
Get Organized
Wally helps you organize your financial life by offering an overview of transactions in a financial calendar, options to upload important bills and receipts, payment reminders so you don’t forget to make any payments, and lists to help you organize your shopping.
Track Your Spending
Wally helps you track your spending and reach your savings goals, either by yourself or jointly, with a friend or family member. You can sync, track, and budget within a group, helping all parties to reach their savings goals together and track their spending.
Learn about the 50/20/30 rule of budgeting.
Costs Of Using The Wally App
The basic version of the Wally App is free, but there is also a paid “Gold” version that offers unique benefits. Both versions still allow you to track budgets, view spending insights, and sync bank accounts. However, the Gold package offers the following extra perks:
- Foreign currency accounts and converter
- Joint accounts
- More flexible budgeting
- More specific categories and filtering
- Payment reminders and notifications
Wally Gold costs $24.99/year or $1.99/month, and includes all the above features. Wally also offers an option to purchase add-ons to your free account. So, if you’re interested in accessing more specific categories but don’t require all the features of the Gold version, you can add that on for an additional $5.99/year. All Gold features are accessible as add-ons to the free account at $5.99/year each.
Additionally, you can earn Wally Coins when you invite friends to the app. These coins allow you to access more app features and upgrade your account.
Check out our complete guide to making a monthly budget.
Pros And Cons Of Using Wally
Here are some benefits and downsides to using Wally for budgeting.
Pros:
- Secure
- Option to see entire financial snapshot in one place
- Wide range and flexibility in budgeting features
- Spending insights to help you plan for your future
- User-friendly
- Works with 15,000 banks and 200+ currencies in 70 countries
- Option to request a bank if Wally doesn’t already offer it
Downsides:
- Recent reviews on the App store cite bugs in the app
- Best features only come with the paid-app option
- Must input all data manually
Wally FAQs
Does Wally work on desktops?
Is Wally safe to use?
Is the Wally App free to use?
Is Wally Right For You?
Many people struggle with creating, maintaining and sticking to a budget. It’s normal to need a bit of support to successfully use a budget, and Wally is a great option for that support. If you find that tracking your spending, budgeting and income is difficult to do on your own, you could benefit from downloading the Wally app.
