Transcription
If you're searching for the best budgeting app this year, Rocket Money is probably at the top of your list. But is it actually worth your time and money? After using it for years, I've uncovered some of the major pros, some sneaky cons, and one feature that genuinely surprised me. In this video, I'm going to share my comprehensive Rocket Money review. I'm going to share exactly how it works, where it delivers, and who it's best suited for, so you can make the best smart financial decisions with your money.
Hey, I'm Kellen from The Savvy Couple. We help busy families simplify their finances and build real freedom from home. Bit and I started using Rocket Money over 5 years ago. We're looking for a budgeting app that was simple, visual, and automated, saving us our most valuable asset, our time. And Rocket Money promised to be that all-in-one budgeting app that could fix it all.
All right, so for this review, just like any review on our channel, I want to make sure it's as transparent and honest as possible. So, I logged into my personal account here. I'm going to give you an overview of what the app looks like, and I'm going to go through each and every feature.
So, what is Rocket Money? Rocket Money is the money app that works for you. Obviously, managing your money and tracking your finances and getting on a budget is super hard, and Rocket Money makes it super simple. They have over 10 million monthly users. You get control over those pesy subscriptions by seeing them all in one place and they can actually cancel them for you. You get to stay on top of everyday spending with your budget. You can put your financial goals on autopilot as far as saving for emergency fund, retirement, or your vacations.
Rocket Money does have a free plan. It lets you link your bank accounts, gives you balance alerts, subscription management, and tracks your spending, but it is very limited. And I recommend going straight to the premium. It's about $6 per month. It helps you cancel your subscriptions, helps you automate your savings, and it helps you really categorize and manage your budget way better. And real quick, there will be an exclusive link in the description that's going to bring you to this page to sign up for a free account to get started today.
All right, so after you log in on this dashboard, you're going to see your current spending for the month, so you can kind of see a graph on where you're at and where you've budgeted to see if you're on pace or not. You're going to be able to see all of your accounts all in one place. Then you're going to see your upcoming bills in the next 14 days. It looks like we have Netflix coming out soon and a medical expense. And then you have your recent transactions here where you can simply and quickly go in and change them to where they need to be. Uh most of the time, I'd say 90% of the time, 95% of the time, they go where they need to be. Um but we like to go in once a month and just make sure everything's categorized correctly. You can go and see all transactions here and then you can look at your budget right here.
So when you sign up with the link below, it's going to bring up this dashboard, but obviously it's going to be blank. The first thing you want to do is link all of your accounts. So, you just kind of come to link account, add institution, search for your account, um, credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, car loans. You want to link everything so you have all data coming in. Um, so you can see your overall financial picture. You can look at your net worth, which is an awesome feature, but also really get your budget dialed in to make sure you are putting your money to work where you need to go.
One of the features that I absolutely love about Rocket Money that a lot of other budgeting apps don't have is this chat with us feature. So, anytime you get hung up on either linking an account, having an account sync, um creating your budget, creating a new uh transaction, whatever it may be, you can basically come on to here, ask a question, and they're going to get back to you right away to keep things moving and just make sure you're not wasting your time trying to learn a new budgeting app.
All right, so let's go over some of the features that Rocket Money has to offer. Again, this is on the website. It's going to be very similar on the mobile app. The mobile app is very userfriendly. You basically get the same dashboards and the same uh look and feel.
So, under reoccurring, this is going to be where Rocket Money absolutely shines. I don't know about you, but monthly subscriptions seem to add up like crazy over time. Whether it's, you know, Disney Plus, Mary Ruth, Netflix, Walmart Plus, Amazon Prime, whatever it is, there's so many subscriptions. Everyone's doing that reoccurring business now. Um, it's hard to stay on top of all of them. Um, this is where Rocket Money totally shines, like I mentioned, is they have it all in one place with when it's due, what account it's coming out out of, and and the amount. So you can quickly and easily kind of scroll through and look at, okay, our Geico insurance payments coming out, Verizon's pay coming out, our mortgage is coming out, whatever it may be. So not only can you plan ahead to make sure you have money in the account to pay for this, um, but again, it shows you all of your subscriptions in one place. And when you're on the premium version, which is about $6 per month, you can click start a cancellation. So you can actually go in and have Rocket Money cancel these for you. So, if you don't like getting on the phone or you don't like tracking down these companies to cancel and and you lost your login, Rocket Money will actually do it on your behalf. So, you can kind of come in and search for which service you want to cancel. So, if we wanted to stop the movie club, we love the movies. Um, we would go in and cancel there. And I've used this a couple times and it's worked very, very well. And then there's also a calendar view so you can look at, okay, first of the month we have Disney Plus and our mortgage coming out. Um, and then you can kind of just look and see a visual of where everything's coming out each month.
All right, so now over to spending up here. You can go last month, you can see how much you spent last month. Last month was a brutal month for us. We had a couple unexpected um expenses come up. Um but Rocket Money helped us kind of manage that. And then this month, this is our total spending. It's the 20th, so we're almost close to the end of the month. Um and you can visually see, which I'm a very visual person. You can see where your money is going. So the mortgage is taking a big chunk of the pie. Um about 25% which is good. We want to stay under 30% for that mortgage if you can. Um medical is a big one for us. We have uh some medical stuff going on in our family. Groceries is out of control. So, this visually quickly shares, okay, we need to, you know, charitable donations. We need to lower our groceries and see what we can do with medical. The mortgage we can't really do anything about. Um but this is really nice to see the categories and then the change in categories. So, um this month we're 11% down um compared to last month for medical. Same thing with groceries, charitable donations, dining, drinks. You can kind of see. And then Kellen, that's my uh discretionary. I'm up 100. So I must have not spent any last month. I'm up 184%. So that's not a good one. That'll be a conversation. So again, you can kind of see monthtomonth your income versus your expenses. And you can go back and look at trends and see your spending breakdown.
All right, so let's dive into the meat of what Rocket Money actually is, which is a budgeting app. Hey, real quick. If you're getting value from this video, can you hit the like button and make sure you're subscribed? And my wife and I have been budgeting for shoot almost two decades now together. We've tried countless different budgeting apps. We actually have a video that I'll share after this one that you can watch that kind of goes through and ranks all of the budgeting apps. And Rocket Money is by far the best one that we have come across as far as value, as far as making sure that we are putting our money where we want it to go and just making us have complete control over our finances.
All right, so up top you have your earnings and income. This is where you'd put your income from both you and your spouse. And then you would kind of break down the expense categories. So auto transport, Britney, her discretionary, we each get kind of discretionary income. We can spend however you want. Bernie's is a coffee mug because she loves going out and getting coffee. Charitable donations, dining and drinking, entertainment, gas and electric, gifts. You can see this kind of broken down on what we spend our money on. So, if you wanted to set up a custom budget like this, again, you just go over to settings, categories, and you can add a category. Super simple. You can change the color. You can change the logo. So, it's very simple and easy to use on the mobile app to see where things are going. And again, a budget does not need to be perfect. Do we budget for every single dollar in our life? No. I don't think that it's worth your time and effort to do that. I think overall you want to have a good understanding where your money's going and if there's, you know, if you're looking at, you know, last month and you're seeing, holy cow, you know, charitable donations, we spent extra. That's a great category to go over on. Um, bad example, dining and drinks, we went over $600. So, you can kind of click into here and see, okay, why did we go over so much? We probably had some big meals out. It was Christmas time. Um, but it you can kind of go in granularly and see where things are going. So you kind of set up your budget and again your first month is just estimating okay here are the categories where we're spending our money and this is about how much I think we are spending on it. Um and then each month you can kind of come in and just change budgeting. So so auto and transport this is basically gas for our truck. We have a Tesla so it's not very high 200 bucks a month. Um and with gas prices going down it's probably going to be even less. So I can probably put in 50 bucks a month um for gas and that's probably good to go. We probably fill up once a month. So changing things like that. Kids activities. Say, you know, we're signing up for another sport. We can upgrade that and make it uh bigger. We got a dog recently, so we added a dog category. And you kind of see in the graph how much you're spending. You can hover over it to see the percentage. And then um you can compare. So anything that's red means that you're over. So dining and drinks, we have spent our entire budget category for that. And it's January 21st, so we're probably going to go out to eat it one more time. We usually cook at home quite a bit to save money, but um for convenience, sometimes we eat out. So then if you go all the way to the bottom, it's going to say spending budget. So $9,000 per month is our kind of overall budget. And it might seem like a lot to you guys. Um depends on where you live. Things cost different in different areas in the world. Um and then this is how much we have left for savings. So this is saying we have almost $3,000 in overage of income that we can put towards savings, towards investing, whatever it may be. So this is a good looking budget for this month. Um, and the fact that we're near the end of the month and we have so much uh left is amazing. So, again, you can kind of go in, you can click each category. So, if we want to go in and just see what we're spending money on, we can do that. This is just a really easy way to sit down with your spouse, look at your budget, look at where money is going, and just talk about, okay, we need to call the insurance company to lower that, whatever it may be. Um, and it's a really good way to get on the same page and really make sure, you know, you work hard for your money, so I want it to work hard for you. And the only way to do that is to manage it better with a budget.
All right. So, another feature that Rocket Money thrives in is the net worth tracker. So, you have a graph up here um where it shows your net worth. You can do it by month, year, date. Um you can put in all of your assets here. And then you can put in any debts that you have, mortgages, all that stuff. And it's basically taking your assets minus your debts or minus your liabilities to give you your net worth. And this is a good overall financial score for you. You want to see this net worth number continue to rise, continue to go up. I will say their net worth feature is a little bit limited compared to something like Empower that we recommend using for net worth. So, we use Rocket Money for our budgeting and then we use Empower for uh net worth tracking. Empower is totally free. Again, I have a video on that in our channel you can check out or I'll link it below. But, this is a good rule of thumb to look at and make sure, okay, our net worth is going in the right direction. We're not taking on more consumer debt. We're not, you know, adding up credit card debt and it's going down. We want it to be going up. So, this is a good visual as well to kind of go over.
Then the transactions, you can come in here, you can sort by date, you can sort by categories. And you kind of come through once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, and just make sure everything's categorized correctly so that your budget is accurate. Um, you can see the reoccurring here as well, and just make sure things are categorized correctly. So, super simple to change the category. Um, again, it's drag and drop and you can search for each category. And then one feature they are adding soon is a free credit score report, which is going to be really good to just see, you know, where your credit score is at. you know, credit card report card, so your credit usage, payment history, hard inquiries, all that stuff.
So, those are the features that Rocket Money has to offer. And now, let's go over the pros and cons.
So, what does Rocket Money do really well? The first one is Rocket Money's autocategorization of your transactions is very good. It's the best in the business. It gets most of your spending right without you needing to micromanage it and go in and change the categories and make sure everything's lined up correctly. Second, canceling subscriptions inside the app. It's a game changer. We had an old streaming service that we totally forgot about and Rocket Money spotted it for us, notified us, and we tap cancel and it removed it completely. Third, it's super simple and easy to use, not only on the mobile app, but also on the website. It has great visuals to show you how you're doing monthtomonth and really makes you feel like you're in control. And fourth, saving goals are builtin. We use this to save up for our latest family vacation, and it made it feel super super easy. And one more that I have to mention again is that we saved over $540 last year from just catching a couple reoccurring charges that we didn't realize were still hitting our account. The subscription features absolute gold when it comes to Rocket Money.
All right, now let's go over the cons. Where does Rocket Money fall short? We truly feel Rocket Money is the best budgeting app out there, but obviously nothing is perfect. The first con is that all bills and expenses are not detected and categorized correctly. Now, like I said before, 95% of the time is correct, but you still have to go in once a month for about 3 to 5 minutes and make sure all the categories are correct, which is actually a good thing because it makes you stay on top of your budget. The second con is that the free version is very limited. I found within a week of using the free version that we wanted to upgrade to the premium version so that we could customize our categories for our needs and really make use of all of the features they have to offer. The third con is that this is a paid budgeting app. There are free budgeting apps out there, but they are nowhere near as robust or useful as a paid Rocket Money subscription. So, I definitely think it's worth every penny. And number four, some users have reported there are glitches or delays when you want to sync your accounts. We haven't really come into any issues like that. Um, but that's something to be noted.
One feature that genuinely surprised me was the automatic subscription cancellation. Rocket Money doesn't just show you the subscription that you're paying for. It actually helps you cancel them. I literally tapped one button on my phone to get rid of a subscription that we hadn't used in months, and it handled the cancellation process altogether. That alone saved us hundreds of dollars and made having a premium subscription worth it.
So, who is Rocket Money perfect for? If you're a busy parent, hate spreadsheets, and want something that's simple and automates most of the process, Rocket Money is for you. If you're a total beginner budgeter or your finances feel chaotic and you just want more control, Rocket Money is perfect. But if you're a hardcore budgeter who loves zerobased budgets or wants complete control like weap gives you, Rocket Money might feel too hands-off. Think of it like this. WAB is building your financial system and Rocket Money is hiring a digital assistant to do the work for you.
So, is Rocket Money still the best budgeting app this year? If your goal is simplicity, clarity, and ease with your finances, then yes, Rocket Money is the best budgeting app out there. If you're ready to get started and want to take complete control of your finances, I have a link in the description below to help you set up your free account. And if you want to see how it compares to other budgeting apps like WAB, Every Dollar, Monarch Money, Empower, check out my next video where I rank the best budgeting apps, compare them side by side, and go over all the pros and cons. I'll see you over there. Thanks for watching. And God bless.