Couples who want to integrate their finances will find an ally in the budgeting app Honeydue.
The app is free, though you have the option to contribute a tip—you can even make it recurring—to help keep the app running. Honeydue is specifically designed to be used by a pair, with both users able to access the same dashboard through their own separate accounts.
With Honeydue, remembering to set aside money for your bills becomes a breeze, as does squaring up for joint purchases. That’s why Buy Side from WSJ named Honeydue the Best Budgeting App for Couples.
Honeydue pros
- Easy to set up joint and individual views
- Free
Each partner signs up for Honeydue with their own account. Then you can link your various financial accounts and credit cards, specifying whether each belongs to you, your partner, or both of you. The app detects your transactions and lists them for you both to view. You can input future expenses and indicate which of you is responsible for paying it.
Nearly every feature in Honeydue can be filtered into joint or individual views, which is what makes the app ideal for couples. You can view your income and various account balances combined or separately to see how much you’ve saved together—and how you’re holding up your end of the bargain.
The transactions page is visually pleasing and easy to understand at a glance. Each expense is color-coded according to its category and marked with which partner made the purchase. You can comment on transactions or react to them with an emoji. If this all gets to be too much, you have the option to make certain transactions visible only to you. Use this feature at your own risk. There’s also a chat box through which you and your partner can leave notes for one another, which helps ensure that all your bill-related conversations stay in one place.
Honeydue includes a page dedicated to your bills, which helps you stay organized and make sure you never miss a payment. You can enter payment dates and specify which partner should receive reminders about paying them. All these due dates are cleanly organized in both calendar and list form.
The budget planning page features graphs that compare spending and earnings in various months compared to one another, which helps you make sure you stay on track.
Honeydue cons
- Inconvenient layout
- Hard to track savings goals
The app is generally easy to navigate, but the main menu at the bottom leaves something to be desired. The options you’ll need to click most often (budget, bills, transactions) are relegated to a “More” button, while the most prominent space belongs to an ad.
While the app excels in bill payment and transaction tracking, there are no built-in features that help make sure you’re meeting your savings goals. If you want to set money aside for saving, you’ll have to enter it as a line item. If savings are your priority, you might want to try an app like Monarch, which we named the Best App for Growing Your Savings.
Our budget app methodology
Before the review process, we spoke with five certified financial planners about budgeting
To pick Best Budgeting Apps, we selected and downloaded 18 apps based on customer reviews and our own discussion with five financial planners.
While using each app, we noted whether it offered various features and, if it did, how good those features were. Those features included: automated suggested budgets, auto-categorization of transactions, the ability to connect with various accounts, price and more.We also took into consideration each app’s design, intuitiveness and ease of use. To see our full methodology, check out our full budgeting app ranking.
Meet the contributor
Kevin J. Ryan is a contributor to Buy Side from WSJ.
