Top 10 Budgeting Apps to Learn for Millennials Juggling Side Hustles and a 9-to-5
The 9-to-5 pays the bills. It’s the stable foundation, the predictable paycheck that keeps the lights on and the fridge stocked. But for a growing number of millennials, that’s just one piece of the financial puzzle. The side hustle—that passion project, freelance gig, or small business—is where the real magic happens. It’s the engine for paying off debt faster, building a robust savings account, or simply funding a life with a little more adventure.
Juggling these two worlds is a masterclass in time management, but it also creates a unique financial challenge. Your income isn't a single, neat deposit every two weeks. It's a mix of a steady salary and the unpredictable ebbs and flows of freelance checks, client payments, and sales. How do you budget when your income is a moving target? How do you track business expenses for your side hustle without them getting lost in your personal spending? The old-school spreadsheet can start to feel like more work than the hustle itself.
This is where technology becomes your greatest ally. The right budgeting app can transform financial chaos into clarity, giving you a real-time command center for all your money, from all your sources. It’s not just about seeing where your money went; it’s about telling it where to go. Here at the Goh Ling Yong blog, we believe financial clarity is the first step to freedom. That’s why we’ve curated a list of the top 10 budgeting apps specifically for millennials who are brilliantly balancing a day job with their entrepreneurial dreams.
1. YNAB (You Need A Budget): For the Proactive Planner
If you're tired of reacting to your finances and want to start directing them, YNAB is your app. Its philosophy is simple but revolutionary: give every single dollar a job. Based on the zero-based budgeting method, you allocate all your income—from your salary to that surprise $200 freelance payment—to specific categories before you spend it. This proactive approach is a game-changer for those with irregular income streams.
The learning curve with YNAB is a bit steeper than with other apps, but the payoff is immense control and awareness. It forces you to confront your spending priorities and make conscious decisions. The platform offers incredible goal-setting features, helping you track progress towards everything from building a six-month emergency fund with your 9-to-5 income to saving for new equipment for your side hustle. It truly helps you align your spending with your values.
Pro Tip: Create a specific category group for your side hustle. Include categories like "Business Software," "Marketing Costs," "Client Gifts," and, most importantly, "Tax Savings." When a client pays you, immediately assign a portion of that income (a good rule of thumb is 25-30%) directly to your "Tax Savings" category. This way, you’re never caught off guard when it's time to pay quarterly taxes.
2. Mint: For the Big-Picture Overview
Mint is one of the original players in the budgeting app space, and it remains popular for a reason. It's the ultimate financial aggregator, a one-stop dashboard where you can see everything at a glance. Connect your checking and savings accounts, credit cards, student loans, car loans, 401(k), and investment portfolios, and Mint will pull it all together to give you a real-time look at your net worth.
For the busy millennial, Mint’s strength lies in its passive, high-level overview. It automatically categorizes your transactions (though you may need to tweak them occasionally) and sends you alerts for upcoming bills or low balances. While it’s less hands-on than YNAB, it’s fantastic for spotting spending trends, tracking your credit score for free, and getting a consolidated view of your entire financial life without much daily effort.
Pro Tip: Use Mint’s "Trends" feature to analyze your side hustle income over time. You can filter by source or category to see which months are most profitable. This data is invaluable for forecasting future income and deciding when you can afford to take on bigger business expenses or invest back into your hustle.
3. Empower Personal Dashboard (formerly Personal Capital): For the Aspiring Investor
If your side hustle is starting to generate serious cash and you’re thinking more about wealth-building than just month-to-month budgeting, Empower Personal Dashboard is essential. While it has budgeting features, its true power lies in its sophisticated investment and net worth tracking tools, which are completely free to use.
Empower provides a detailed analysis of your investment portfolio, including your 9-to-5's retirement plan and any brokerage accounts you've funded with your side gig profits. Its "Retirement Planner" is one of the best in the business, running simulations to tell you if you’re on track for your goals. It also has a great "Investment Checkup" tool that analyzes your portfolio's asset allocation and fees, helping you spot hidden costs that could be eating into your returns.
Pro Tip: Link all your investment accounts and run the "Retirement Fee Analyzer." Many people are shocked to discover how much they’re paying in fees within their 401(k) or mutual funds. Using this insight, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest the profits from your side hustle, potentially saving you tens of thousands of dollars over the long run.
4. Rocket Money: For the Subscription Slayer
In the world of side hustles, every dollar counts. You’re likely paying for a multitude of services—design software, web hosting, scheduling tools, stock photo sites—and that’s on top of personal subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify. Rocket Money (formerly Truebill) excels at finding all those recurring charges and making it incredibly easy to cancel the ones you no longer need.
This app is the master of finding "money leaks." It presents all your subscriptions in a clean list, and for many services, you can cancel them directly from the app with a single tap. Beyond that, Rocket Money also offers a bill negotiation service. They’ll attempt to lower bills like your internet or cell phone on your behalf, taking a percentage of the savings as their fee. For a busy professional, this kind of automated saving is pure gold.
Pro Tip: Do a full subscription audit with Rocket Money once every quarter. It's easy to sign up for a free trial of a tool for a specific freelance project and forget to cancel it. A quarterly check-in ensures you’re only paying for services that actively contribute to your business growth or personal well-being.
5. Simplifi by Quicken: For a Modern, Balanced Approach
If you find Mint too passive but YNAB too intensive, Simplifi might be your perfect middle ground. It offers a clean, modern interface focused on helping you create a simple yet powerful spending plan. It automatically projects your future cash flow based on your recurring bills and paychecks (including your 9-to-5 salary), so you always know how much is safe to spend.
One of Simplifi's best features for side hustlers is its customizable watchlists. You can easily isolate and track spending in specific areas. For example, you can create a watchlist for "Side Hustle Expenses" or "Travel Costs" to keep a close eye on them without getting lost in your overall budget. It provides the clarity you need to make sure your business is actually profitable.
Pro Tip: Use Simplifi's income tracker to tag all incoming payments. You can tag your salary as "9-to-5" and then create custom tags for different freelance clients or income streams (e.g., "Client A," "Etsy Shop," "Consulting"). This makes it incredibly easy to see which parts of your hustle are the most lucrative.
6. Goodbudget: For the Digital Envelope Stuffer
Based on the classic cash envelope system, Goodbudget is perfect for visual thinkers and those who want to be more mindful about their spending. Instead of linking to your bank accounts for automated tracking, you manually add your income and distribute it into digital "Envelopes" for different spending categories like "Groceries," "Rent," and "Business Supplies."
This manual approach might seem like a drawback, but it’s actually the app's core strength. The act of manually logging transactions forces you to be more conscious of every purchase. Goodbudget is also fantastic for couples managing finances together. You can sync your budgets across multiple phones, so when one person spends from the "Dining Out" envelope, it updates for both of you in real-time.
Pro Tip: Create an "Irregular Income" envelope. When you get paid from a side gig, put the money there first. Then, on a set day (e.g., the 1st of the month), "fill" your other envelopes from this holding account. This smooths out your cash flow and helps you budget on a consistent "salary" even when your income is lumpy.
7. EveryDollar: For the Debt-Focused Hustler
If your primary goal for your side hustle is to demolish debt, EveryDollar is the app for you. Created by financial personality Dave Ramsey, it’s built around the principles of zero-based budgeting and the "debt snowball" method. The app’s interface is clean, simple, and laser-focused on helping you create a plan for your money each month.
EveryDollar is incredibly motivating for debt payoff. You can input all your debts and the app will help you track your progress as you throw every extra dollar from your side hustle at them. It visualizes your success, which can provide a powerful psychological boost to keep you going. The free version requires manual transaction entry, while the premium version syncs with your bank accounts.
Pro Tip: In the app, customize your budget to "plan" for extra debt payments. When you get an unexpected freelance check, immediately go into the app, add it to your income for the month, and assign that exact amount to your smallest debt. This reinforces the habit of using your side hustle income with intention.
8. Honeydue: For the Power Couple
Managing money with a partner adds another layer of complexity, especially when one or both of you have side hustles. Honeydue is designed specifically to make this easier. It allows you and your partner to link your individual and joint accounts to get a transparent view of your shared financial picture.
The genius of Honeydue is in its balance of transparency and privacy. You can choose which accounts and what level of detail to share with your partner. You can see all your balances and transactions in one place, set up budgets for shared expenses like rent and utilities, and even chat and send reminders about bills right within the app. It takes the awkwardness out of money conversations.
Pro Tip: Keep your primary side hustle business account linked to Honeydue but perhaps choose to share only the balance, not every single transaction. This allows your partner to see the overall health and growth of your business without needing to get into the weeds of every minor business expense.
9. Copilot Money: For the Design-Conscious Optimizer
For those who appreciate slick design and smart technology (and are on iOS/Mac), Copilot is a dream. This beautifully designed app uses AI to provide a more intelligent and automated financial tracking experience. It learns your spending habits and gets smarter over time, leading to better and more accurate transaction categorization with minimal manual effort.
Copilot provides insightful summaries and can automatically detect recurring bills and subscriptions, even those that aren't on a fixed schedule. It offers a premium, polished experience that feels less like a chore and more like having a personal financial analyst in your pocket. Its ability to seamlessly integrate investment tracking also makes it a strong all-in-one contender.
Pro Tip: Let Copilot’s AI do the heavy lifting. Spend the first month diligently correcting any miscategorized transactions. The app will learn quickly, and soon it will be able to distinguish between a "Business Meal" at a coffee shop for a client meeting and a "Coffee Shops" expense for your personal latte.
10. Tiller Money: For the Spreadsheet Guru
If you love the infinite flexibility of a spreadsheet but hate the tedious work of manual data entry, Tiller is your holy grail. Tiller is a unique service that automatically pulls all your daily transactions and balances from your bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial institutions directly into a Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel file.
This gives you the ultimate power and customization. You get all the raw data, neatly organized, and can use Tiller’s pre-made templates or build your own custom dashboards from scratch. For a side hustler, this is incredibly powerful. You can create a detailed profit and loss statement for your business, track reimbursable expenses, and build charts to visualize your income streams in any way you can imagine. As Goh Ling Yong often advises, choosing the right tool is half the battle, and for data lovers, this is it.
Pro Tip: Create a separate tab in your Tiller spreadsheet to serve as your "Side Hustle P&L." Use a "Category" column to tag all relevant income and expenses. Then, use simple spreadsheet formulas (like SUMIF) to automatically calculate your monthly and quarterly gross income, total expenses, and net profit. This makes tax preparation almost effortless.
Your Financial Command Center Awaits
Juggling a 9-to-5 and a side hustle is a testament to your ambition and drive. But that hard work deserves a financial system that supports it, not complicates it. The chaos of multiple income streams, business expenses, and personal spending doesn't have to be overwhelming. By choosing the right budgeting app, you can build a command center that provides clarity, control, and confidence.
Whether you're a proactive planner who needs YNAB's structure, a big-picture thinker who loves Mint's dashboard, or a spreadsheet guru who craves Tiller's flexibility, there is a tool on this list that will fit your financial style. The key is to start. Pick one that resonates with you, commit to using it for a month, and watch as the fog lifts from your finances.
What's your go-to budgeting app for managing your multiple income streams? Share your favorites and any pro tips in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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