PocketSmith Review 2023

Full PocketSmith Review

Do you need to get a better handle on your finances? PocketSmith is an app to help you manage your finances. With forecasting and full synchronization with your financial accounts, this is one of the best virtual financial advisors around. You can track how your spending habits will impact your finances six months down the line to thirty years into the future.

PocketSmith is best for:

• In-depth personal finance management
• Budgeting
• Financial planning

Our review on PocketSmith shows that this is a financial tracking app that goes further than its competitors. By providing lots of important insights, the PocketSmith app can help you control your finances.

Keep reading our PocketSmith review to find out more.

PocketSmith at a Glance

PocketSmith was founded in 2008 by New Zealand entrepreneurs Jason Leong, Francois Bondiguela, and James Wigglesworth. The goal of the app was to create a platform that allows people to manage their finances and receive vital insights via a calendar-like app.

The software uses a Google-like calendar to provide you with information on your current balances and future forecasts. It offers full synchronization with your financial accounts and the different budget categories enable you to drill down into your finances quickly.

Our review on PocketSmith believes that the platform comes with features that go beyond what’s ordinarily available with financial tracking apps. The forecasting feature is especially potent and the focus on modifying consumer behavior is a real selling point for this app.

We examine the core features of PocketSmith.

Future Financial Forecasting

Perhaps the main selling point of this app is it uses your data to allow you to make financial projections up to 30 years into the future. It will even estimate your daily bank balances. You can perform these calculations using several different time periods.

Although most people won’t need such a high level of precision, it’s worth noting that you can actually find financial projections by month (and even by date!). This tool could come in handy if you’re planning a vacation or anticipating a big life change. Thanks to automatic interest calculations, it can also show you how premature withdrawals could impact the effectiveness of compound interest in interest-earning accounts.

Budget Calendar

The PocketSmith budgeting calendar pinpoints your recurring costs and tracks them through their calendar. Use this data to plan your projected expenses. These can be color-coded by category, and the platform also allows you to come up with your own customized categories.

The budget calendar is designed with ease of use in mind, so you’ll be able to drag and drop your way to financial success. Once you’ve entered all of the relevant information, this tool will complete all of the calculations almost instantly, minimizing the time you need to allocate to budgeting. Like the forecasting feature, the budget calendar can also provide you with accurate budget estimates down to the day! This will help you avoid future cashflow issues.

Scenario Testing

Want to spend a year traveling overseas and don’t know how it will impact your finances?

PocketSmith scenario testing allows you to plan for the future by examining the impact of different life decisions. Just click a button and you’ll see how your big life decisions will impact your finances.

Since scenario testing enables you to see the short and long-term effects of any financial decisions you make, it can be extremely helpful when planning for the future. Since you can create multiple scenarios for every possible expense, you’ll be able to test and know your budgetary limits ahead of time (rather than learning you overspent after the fact).

Income and Expense Statements

Press a button and PocketSmith will report all your income and expenses in one simple report. Turning your personal finances into a profit & loss statement is a great way of getting a high-level view of your finances.

Statements can also be used to track your net worth and get a detailed report on your outstanding debts (such as credit cards, personal loans, or student loans). Since PocketSmith automatically converts foreign currencies to your own, these income and expense statements are ideal for users with international assets.

PocketSmith Pricing

Most reviews on PocketSmith point out the problematic pricing scheme. The issue is that even though they offer a free version of PocketSmith, the free option is so gutted of useful features that it’s barely worth using at all. We’d recommend opting for a subscription plan if you’re going to use this platform. However, if you decide you’ve “over-upgraded,” you can always switch to a lower-tier plan at any time!

Payments options are currently limited to Visa and Mastercard. PocketSmith doesn’t support American Express (as of 11/27/2022), nor does it allow users to make payments via PayPal.

Free Plan – PocketSmith describes this plan as ideal “for the casual budgeter.” However, we wholeheartedly disagree with this description! The “casual budgeter” is likely a person who wants to quickly determine how much money they can spend without overextending their finances. This hypothetical person probably wants to avoid spending time entering and calculating data.

Unfortunately, the “casual budgeter” won’t be able to fully enjoy either of these benefits with the free plan. To be fair, the free plan does provide a complete financial picture with financial forecasts (which can be helpful when trying to make important money decisions). However, users will need to enter any and all data manually, which—depending on the number of additional transactions they’re trying to track—could take a long period of time. You’ll also be restricted by a 2-account limit.

The free plan is marginally more effective than creating a paper budget calendar. Considering there are many budgeting services out there that offer more features for free, we’d recommend considering alternative options (such as the Premium & Super plans).

Premium Plan – This plan is PocketSmith’s “most popular subscription,” and for good reason. With a maximum price of $9.95 per month, the Premium plan unlocks all of the features you’d expect from a budgeting app. You’ll enjoy instant access to automatic bank feeds and automatic transaction categorization.

This means you’ll no longer have to manually enter data yourself (assuming you bank at one of the 12,000+ supported institutions). That said, you’ll still have the option to enter transactions manually if you wish.

Have foreign accounts? Not a problem: PocketSmith will automatically convert your foreign currencies to your local currency, making it easy to keep track of your balances and debts.

The Premium plan allows you to set an unlimited number of budgets, which you can use to project your finances for up to ten years in the future. The 10-account limit imposed by this plan should be adequate for most subscribers, although those with more than ten active accounts will have to upgrade to the “Super” plan.

As mentioned above, the monthly plan ($9.95/month) is the most expensive option for the Premium plan. You can save 16% by subscribing to the quarterly plan ($24.95/quarter) or 24% by subscribing to the annual plan ($89.95/year).

Super Plan – The “Super” plan is ideal for power users with active budgets who need help managing over ten accounts at once. It’s also perfect for those who want the ability to micromanage their bank account(s) with the 30-year forecast feature!

This all-access plan includes all of the features—such as automatic categorization and unlimited budgets—that Premium offers, sans any restrictions. In other words, you can track unlimited accounts with this plan.

Currently, “Super” is offered as a monthly plan ($19.95/month), a quarterly plan ($44.95/quarter), and an annual plan ($169.96/year). We recommend opting for an extended plan, as this can save you up to 29%.

Who Should Avoid Using PocketSmith?

While we definitely think that Pocket Smith offers a great service with plenty of premium features, we can’t—in good faith—claim that this personal finance tool will be ideal for everyone. We don’t recommend PocketSmith if:

• You only have one or two accounts. While the PocketSmith financial tools do allow you to manage two bank accounts for free, there are other budgeting apps that will give you a better experience (such as not requiring manual transaction entries for budget allocations).
• You want a premium experience for free. We really don’t recommend the free version of PocketSmith, as it’s really only suitable for the simplest individual budgets. You’ll need to subscribe to a spending plan if you want more advanced features, but you can get these for free with alternative budgeting apps.
• You don’t care about projecting future income/expenses. If you’re only concerned with monthly budgets and aren’t trying to predict your financial situation years in the future, PocketSmith doesn’t have anything unique to offer you.

Is PocketSmith Right for You?

Our review on PocketSmith can conclude that this is the perfect app for people who want to get serious about taking their finances to the next level. Personal finances are tough to manage, but this app goes beyond basic tracking of day-to-day spending.

It can also be fully integrated with Mint, which many customers enjoy. Overall, other than the high pricing, we can’t say anything negative about PocketSmith.

Check out PocketSmith and sign up for a free account today.