Quicken Simplifi review: The customizable budgeting and expense tracking app for a post-mint world

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Quicken Simplifi is a money management program that goes beyond expense tracking and budgeting. The app offers a complete overview of your financial life, incorporating tools to help you reach your savings goals. The app also offers a high degree of customization, allowing users to create personalized tags, categories, reports, and alerts.

While Quicken Simplifi costs money to use, most quality budgeting and expense-tracking apps do. Still, if you're willing to pay a monthly fee to access one of the most full-featured money-management apps, Quicken Simplifi may be just what you're looking for. 

What is Quicken Simplifi best for? 

Quicken Simplifi is an easy-to-use app that can appeal to those who want to understand their finances and want to pay for the extra features. It may be best for: 

1. Users who want a comprehensive financial tool: There are plenty of free budgeting apps out there, but most are pretty bare-bones. Simplifi offers a feature-rich, customizable platform for expense tracking, budgeting, and financial planning.
2. Individuals or families with complex financial lives: Simplifi's investment tracking, custom tags and categories, and detailed reporting make it ideal for those with multiple accounts, assets, and financial goals.
3. Users who value customization and control: Simplifi offers a high degree of customization, allowing users to tailor their budgets, alerts, and reports to their specific needs and preferences.
4. Those willing to pay for a premium experience: While Simplifi does charge a monthly fee, users who value an ad-free, feature-rich platform may find it worth the cost.
5. Investors looking to optimize their portfolios: Simplifi's investment tracking tools, which allow users to monitor performance, allocation, and diversification across multiple accounts, make it a solid choice for investors.

How much does Quicken Simplifi cost?

Quicken Simplifi's standard price is $3.99 per month, but the product is currently on sale for $2.99 per month, as of August 2024. The service is billed annually, so you must pay $35.88 up front for an entire year of service.

While Quicken Simplifi doesn’t offer a free trial, users can request a full refund within the first 30 days if they aren’t happy with the experience. 

Quicken Simplifi features 

Quicken Simplify offers a full range of features aimed at maximizing every dollar. Here are some of the tools the app offers. 

Expense tracking and spending plan

Quicken Simplifi goes beyond basic expense tracking to help you understand exactly where your money is going, what areas you're overspending in, and what money is available to you for future expenses and savings goals. 

You can link your accounts in Simplifi by providing login credentials, including bank accounts, credit cards, savings accounts, lines of credit, money market accounts, IRA and brokerage accounts, and many more. 

Once your accounts are linked, you'll have access to real-time information about your income, current account balances, and spending. You can organize your expenses in different categories, so your spending plan accurately shows where your money is going. 

Simplifi will detect recurring expenses to predict your future balance and show you how much you spend on different categories, such as restaurants, groceries, and gas. 

All of this data forms the basis for your Simplifi spending plan. The plan divides monthly spending into four different categories:

• Income minus your expected bills, subscriptions, transfers, and contributions to savings goals. 
• Planned spending, or the amount you expect to spend on both recurring and one-time expenses such as groceries and gas
• Other spending, which is calculated when you update your financial activity and includes an up-to-the-minute tally of other expenses you incur that are not pre-planned
• Money available, which is the amount that is left after subtracting all of the other expenses from income. 

Savings tools 

Saving money can be a challenge, but tracking your efforts can help you stay motivated and focused on your goal. Quicken Simplifi streamlines this process by making it easy to create and monitor savings goals. 

To create a savings goal, simply select "New Goal" and input your goal amount, how much you’ve saved so far towards your goal (if any), and a target date. You can choose whether the goal should be included in your spending plan and specify when and how much money you want to contribute. 

Once you tell Quicken you want to invest a set amount towards each goal, the app will subtract that amount when displaying your available balance without withdrawing funds from your traditional or online bank account. 

This feature is one of the best Quicken offers, as you're less likely to spend money earmarked towards savings, and you can easily see if your proposed contributions are realistic or will leave you with too little in your bank account. 

Dashboard 

Quicken Simplifi's Dashboard puts all of the great program's features front and center to give you fast, easy access to crucial money management tools. 

Your Dashboard starts with nine default tiles that offer you a quick overview of your financial situation and fast access to other tools. The default tiles include:

• A Spending Watchlist — which tracks and monitors specific areas of spending 
• Your Achievements — various badges you’ll earn when you complete a savings goal and other actions 
• Your investments
• Your savings goals
• Your spending plan 
• Bills and payments
• The last six months of income 
• The last six months of spending
• Spending over the past few days
• Your top spending categories over the past 30 days 

You can move the locations of these tiles or change which tiles appear if you'd prefer to see different things. By customizing the dashboard, you can focus on what's most important to you and all of your data is at your fingertips so its easy to navigate. 

Real-time alerts

Quicken Simplifi’s real-time alerts do the work for you to stay on top of your finances. You can customize notifications to alert you about: 

• A contribution made to your goals 
• A high credit card balance
• A projected low bank balance
• An extra paycheck month
• A bank fee charge 
• A paid bill 
• An earned achievement badge 
• Large deposits
• Large transactions
• Low bank account balances
• Monthly spending and saving summaries 
• Planned expenses close to or over the allotted limit 
• Income received 
• Spending updates
• The status of a refund
• Uncategorized transactions
• Upcoming bills

With the ability to get so many alerts in real-time, you can avoid overspending, overdrafting accounts, missing a bill, or making other financial mistakes. 

Customizations 

Customization is another area where Quicken Simplifi shines. The app offers personalized features for almost every aspect of managing your money. Here are just some of the ways you can make the app your own:

• Customize transactions: After importing your transactions to Quicken, you can create custom tags, assign them to custom categories, and even create customized flags for transactions you want to revisit later. You can split a single transaction, assigning multiple categories or tags to one purchase if, for example, you went to Target and bought both groceries and clothes. There's no limit to the number of categories or subcategories you can create, depending on how hands-on you want to be. 
• Customize reports: Quicken prepares real-time reports, offering a big-picture overview of your finances. Customizing these reports allows you to focus on what matters most to you. You can create reports based on the payee, spending categories, tags, subcategories, and dates. You can also choose what type of reports you want, including spending, income, savings, net worth, summaries, credit history, and more. 

Because the software is very intuitive, all these customizations are easy and involve only a few clicks. There's no major learning curve, unlike with some competitor programs. 

Is Quicken Simplifi worth the cost? 

While Quicken Simplifi does come with a monthly fee, many users find that the financial management tools and insights it provides are well worth the cost. Many users say the app:

• Saves time: By automatically categorizing transactions and providing a clear overview of your finances, Simplifi can save you hours of manual budgeting and expense tracking each month.
• Helps you stay on track: With customizable alerts and real-time updates, Simplifi makes it easy to stay on top of your financial goals and avoid overspending or missing bills.
• Provides customized insights: Simplifi's detailed reports and analytics can help you identify areas where you may be overspending, as well as opportunities to save ,more or invest for the future.

Quicken Simplifi user experience 

One of Quicken Simplifi's standout features is its intuitive, user-friendly interface that makes managing your money a breeze. The app's clean, modern design and clear navigation make it easy for users of all skill levels to get started and find the tools they need.

Upon signing up, Simplifi guides you through the process of connecting your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts. The app securely syncs your transactions and balances, automatically categorizing expenses to give you an instant overview of your spending.

For investment tracking, Simplifi offers a comprehensive overview of your portfolio across multiple accounts. You can view your allocation, performance, and diversification and even compare your portfolio to market benchmarks.

Throughout the app, helpful tooltips and guides provide context and support, making it easy to navigate even the more advanced features. And if you ever get stuck, Quicken offers customer support via chatbot or its help center. 

How Quicken Simplifi compares to alternatives 

Quicken Simplifi is one of the most affordable financial management tools. For example, the popular alternative You Need a Budget (YNAB) costs $14.99 monthly—around three times more than Simplifi. 

There are also some free tools out there, but they are not nearly as feature-rich as Simplifi. Despite the cost, Quicken's tool still provides an excellent value, given all you receive from it. 

Here’s a closer look at how Quicken Simplifi stacks up against some of its top competitors:

While all of these apps offer budgeting and expense-tracking features, Quicken Simplifi stands out for its investment tracking, highly customizable categories and tags, and real-time alerts. It also offers bill management and savings goal features, which some competitors lack.

Simplifi also offers more flexibility in managing your funds. While apps like YNAB and EveryDollar are both designed to help you implement a zero-based budgeting system, Simplifi works with whatever budgeting method you prefer and creates a personalized spending plan.

If you want to go beyond budgeting, Simplifi also has you covered there. Its investment tools allow you to see your investment accounts, track investment performance, and get insights into whether your portfolio is properly diversified. 

Competitor apps like Goodbudget focus mostly on budgeting, savings goals, and debt payoff but don't provide a big-picture overview of your net worth or the ability to import expenses to easily see if you're sticking to your spending limits. 

The bottom line 

Quicken Simplifi is a full-featured app, but not complicated to use. With just a few clicks on the web-based or mobile app, you can customize alerts, see your spending and savings goals, categorize transactions to track expenses, and get a big-picture overview of your finances. 

Although you pay a fee, it's cheaper than what many similar programs charge, and the customization and tools you gain access to are well worth paying for. 

Editorial disclosure: Opinions expressed are author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included in the post.