Review of Clarity Money Budgeting App

In this video, I'll give you my thoughts on Clarity Money. This is part of a series where I review budget apps.

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Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I'll give you my thoughts on Clarity Money. This is part of a series where I review budget apps.

I have used a variety of budget systems over the years. I was a long time user of Mint and did a YouTube series on budgeting with Mint. Now I use YNAB, but I’m always open to looking at other apps to see what tools or techniques they might be offering. A while back, I did a deep dive comparative analysis of 3 different apps: Mint, YNAB, and EveryDollar. This involved using all of these platforms in parallel for several weeks. In this series, I won’t be doing that level of analysis. Instead, I’ll give you my thoughts after linking an account and attempting to put in and use a budget.

In this video, I take a look at Clarity Money. A general rule with budget apps is that the ones that provide a way to link your bank and credit card accounts either charge a monthly fee OR have pretty limited budgeting tools and features. This app falls into the second category. It’s a free app where you can link your accounts, but the budgeting features are really limited.

I couldn’t really figure out what the deal was with this app until I determined out that it is owned by Marcus Online. Marcus Online is a service created by Goldman Sacks that offers online savings accounts, CDs, and personal loans. So, I’m guessing Clarity Money is an upsell vehicle for their other products. The bottom line is that budgeting apps have to make money somehow. Mint seems to make money through relentless advertising. Other budget apps make money through monthly fees. I don’t know this for certain, but I’m assuming Clarity uses its app and your log-in email address to upsell the financial products from Marcus Online.

Let’s just take a quick look at the app. There are 4 screens. This first one is the main screen with modules or cards containing a variety of things including your transactions and budget reports. We’ll come back to this in a second. The second screen shows all of the financial accounts that you have linked to the app. I linked my credit card, so that is what is showing up. I could also have my checking accounts, savings accounts, and other credit cards linked here. This next screen is a list of transactions with the ability to search by keyword or amount. And finally, the last screen is my account information.

I found it fairly straightforward to link my credit card account. Once you do this, most budget apps give you the ability to set up a budget. Not Clarity Money. In fact, the budget is kind of buried in this first screen. You need to scroll down past a little welcome card with a faintly irritating quote, a sum of your cash on hand and credit card debt, a report of how much you’ve spent in the past few days, a list of transactions, a card telling me when my credit card bill is due, a report showing a breakdown of how much I’ve spent out of my total income, and finally, my weekly budget. All the way down here!

If I click on this budget card, I can see my budget. And here is where things start to fall apart. The budget line items are set — meaning you can’t change them. And you can’t add any more. So they came up with 18 budget categories, and those will have to do for you! They don’t have a category for insurance, so you’ll need to figure out where to put that. Health and Fitness will have to cover not only doctors visits and prescriptions, but also gym memberships, and new glasses. Anyway — this would not work for me. It’s too limited. You can pretty easily change the budget amount for any category by hitting the plus or minus sign, but Clarity Money will only allow you to budget the money you say you have in income each month — which you can change in your account profile. In addition, it only seems to show a weekly budget, rather than monthly, which is the norm. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to see budgets in the past or future. Now, you can see a pie chart which will show you spending in past months by budget category if you go back to the main screen, but you can’t see during that month how that spending compared to what you budgeted. You can also see a total amount spent at a specific vendor by month or week and then see those transactions. The only other thing Clarity does is parcel out the purchases that look like subscriptions like Netflix or Audible. Then i guess they can help you cancel those subscriptions directly from the app. That’s pretty nice. And that’s basically it – the other two cards are advertisements.

[jamesflynn]

Thank you for taking a look at these tools, really useful info for someone trying to get started with budgeting via a tool

[FeliciaWilliams]

I have to say I am one of those that has drank all the YNAB kool-aid and loving it. I started YNAB last January in prep for buying a home. Now that I am in my second year, learning to set up the budget template and giving goals to just about every category is really a game changer for me. It really does make you examine your behavior and change behavior.

[signatient.]

seems to not work anymore
app not available i get

[dbibbyma]

Thanks. Very informative. I am looking for a Budgeting Overview app. Not Clarity

[mikesmith]

can a husband and wife share their spending on this app?