Budgeting your money and understanding your finances is one of the most important things that you can do for yourself and your family, but if you aren’t used to doing a monthly budget, it can be confusing.
It’s vital that you understand where your money is coming from and where every dollar is going. You could track all of your spending manually by writing it down in a notebook, or you can put down that 19th century technology and turn to one of the online tools available for people who no longer use the Pony Express. LearnVest has become one of the leading online budgeting tools and can make your budgeting drastically easier. Best of all, it’s FREE!
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What is LearnVest
LearnVest is a personal finance website that can help you get a clear picture of your money and help you become more financially literate. If you’ve ever used Mint or Personal Capital, you’ll notice some similarities between with what Learnvest has to offer.
As a company, they were created in 2009, and have grown to have over 1.5 million users. Northwestern Mutual bought the company, which is a financial and insurance company that has over 159 years of experience in the financial world.
LearnVest gives you the option to create a free account on the website, which can be done in a matter of minutes. While there are some services and tools that you can’t use for free, the majority of benefits you won’t have to pay for.
After you create a profile, you can sync all of your banking accounts to the LearnVest profile. Linking your banking accounts to your profile is simple, enter your username and password for your online banking info, and LearnVest will handle the rest. It should be noted that LearnVest only supports American banks.
After you’ve connected your accounts, you will need to set your goals. LearnVest wants to know what your financial milestones are, and help you get there as quickly as possible.
Your goals can be anything from building your savings account to paying down your debt. You can set what you target limit, and it will track your progress towards reaching it.
It will show you all of your transaction in one place, and you can categorize them based on the spending. This is an excellent way to show where your money is going and find areas of your budget that you can cut back and save money.
Not only can it show you how your money is being spent, but you can also create a budget for your finances on the website. In fact, LearnVest makes it extremely simple to set up a budget.
Your spending can be set up into separate categories, and you can make personal limits for each category. You can include all of your bills, loans, and other spending sections. You can set your expenses that are fixed, and then also have flexible spending categories that are going to change every month.
Having a budget is great, but it’s only beneficial if you follow it. LearnVest makes it easy to track the progress of your budget and see how much money you have left in each category before you go over.
Learnvest Plans
Learn Vest has two plans available. Each of them has merits and can help you take your finances to the next level.
Free Plan
I signed up for the free plan and the interface is really nice. Inside your dashboard you can connect the accounts from your bank, credit cards, investment accounts and loans. The platform helps you go through your finances and come up with a comprehensive plan for winning with your money.
When I signed up I was offered a 15 minute consultation call to help me get through the dashboard. I didn’t feel I needed it, but it is a nice add-on that shows LearnVest is really pushing to be customer friendly.
The budgetting section is EASY to use. You can make the budget with as much or little detail as you want. They walk you through fixed and flexible expenses and then help you make sure you are putting money toward your priorities.
Paid Plan
The paid plan is not cheap, but it isn’t outrageous for what you get. It will cost you $199 to get set up and then $19 a month to continue.
You get everything that the free plan offers and you are paired with a Certified Financial planner who you work with as long as you have the service and they work for LearnVest. This gives you some continuity and someone to bounce ideas off of for your planning and investing
If you think the pricing for this is too high, then you need to know that the national average for putting together a financial plan with a fee based CFP is $1900 and then you would pay a per hour charge to spend time with them updating the plan. This is much less for very similar level service.
Syncing Your Accounts
Learn Vest does a great job at syncing with major institutions. So if you have a loan, savings account, investment account, or credit card with pretty much any major carrier the service will sync up and automatically pull all your information into your financial planning dashboard.
This gives you the opportunity to make a comprehensive financial plan all in one place.There are five different kinds of accounts you can sync to and they include:
Banking
If you are just looking for a budgeting app then this is the most important feature you want to have. The banks include for syncing are:
- Ally
- Bank of America
- BB&T
- Capital One
- Chase
- Charles Schwab
- Citi Bank
- Citizens Bank
- Fifth Third Bank
- HSBC
- Navy Federal Credit Union
- PNC
- Regions
- SunTrust
- TD Bank
- USAA
- USBank
- Wells Fargo
Investment
Being able to sync my investment accounts is one of the reasons I signed up for the free plan.
While my wife keeps our checkbook in Quicken on her laptop it is hard for me to get a complete view of all our savings/investing. You can sync LearnVest to investing accounts from:
- American Funds
- Capital One 360
- Charles Schwab
- E*Trade
- Edward Jones
- Fidelity – both individual and net benefits
- JP Morgan
- Merrill Lynch
- Morgan Stanley
- Principal
- Scottrade
- TD Ameritrade
- Thrift Savings Plan
- TIAA Cref
- T.Rowe Price
- USAA
- Vanguard
Credit Cards
Credit card debt is a financial sink hole because of their high interest rates. If you are carrying credit card debt and not paying off the entire bill each month then you are hurting yourself. LearnVest can synce with the following accounts to help you get it paid of faster:
- American Express
- Bank of America
- Barclay Card
- Capital One
- Chase
- CitiBank
- Discover
- HSBC
- Orchard Bank
- USAA
- USBank
- Wells Fargo
- Several Store Credit Cards
Mortgages
It is hard to calculate net worth without knowing how much your home is worth and how much you owe. You can sync mortgage information from these lenders:
- Bank of America
- BB&T
- Chase
- Citi Bank
- EverHome
- FlagStar
- GMAC
- MetLife
- PenFed
- PHH Mortgage
- PNC
- Provident Funding
- Quicken Loans
- SunTrust
- USBank
- Wells Fargo
Loans
Getting rid of personal and student loans is a big step in moving forward with your finances. You can monitor you loan payoffs through LearnVest with:
- ACE
- AES
- Bank of America
- Capital One
- Citi Bank
- Chase
- ECSI
- EdFinancial
- FedLoan
- Great Lakes
- Honda
- Mohela
- Nelnet
- SallieMae
- Toyota
- USAA
- Wells Fargo
Advantages of LearnVest
There are dozens of different websites and smartphone apps that make budgeting and finances easier, so what sets LearnVest apart of the competitors. There are several advantages to LearnVest that you should be aware of.
The first is that they also provide tons of articles to help you make the most of your money. There have dozens of articles for different categories of spending, like “weddings,” “food and drink,” “psych of money,” and much more.
The company is dedicating to helping you manage your money and understand the different aspects of financial education. For example, they have articles about “what to know about refinancing your student loans” or “how to keep your food costs from creeping up.”
Another nice incentive to LearnVest is the app available to iOS users (sorry, no Android version yet), which makes it great for tracking your expenses when you can’t sit down in front of a computer.
The app is a nice addition because most people don’t have the time in the middle of the day, and it makes it much easier to stick to your budget when you have it right in front on you.
Disadvantages
The website is a great tool for you to use to grab the reins of your money, but there is one downside to LearnVest. They don’t have a way to pull information from smaller institutions.
Now this is not completely unexpected. Small institutions have a myriad of interfaces and some just do not have the capability. What would be nice is that if you do your banking at a credit union or investing with a small firm that has the capability to send that information electronically, that you could set it up and have it pull your data.
Is LearnVest for you?
After reading all of that, you’re probably wondering if LearnVest is worth your time. Because there are so many similar apps and websites like LearnVest, you’ll have to determine which ones is going to work best for you, but LearnVest is worth checking out to see if it fits your preferences.
If you’re looking to get more money out of your budget and you want a simple way to do that, then LearnVest could be the perfect option for you. It makes it extremely simple to create a budget and have all of your spending displayed in one place.
If you’re more of an experienced “budget-er” and you know your way around the finance world, you’ll probably want to look at other options. LearnVest does an excellent job of keeping the interface simple and clean, which makes it easy for anyone to navigate, but it also drastically limits the ability to customize and tweak the nuts and bolts of the budget.
Additionally, if you’re a hardcore investor and you want to keep an eye on your investments and your net worth, you’ll need to find a better program. Because it doesn’t allow you to sync any of your investments, it would be almost worthless to you. Hopefully, the LearnVest developers are going to add the ability for investments shortly.
Learnvest Review Final Thoughts
Because smart money management is one of the best skills to have, it’s worthwhile to start using LearnVest or one of the programs like it. If you’re looking for one of the easiest and simplest websites to enhance your financial literacy skills, this is one of the best.
You can start your journey towards better control of your cash in a matter of minutes. If you decide that you don’t like LearnVest, you haven’t lost anything other than an hour of your time.
Sign up for a FREE Learnvest Account Today!
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