PocketGuard Review [2024]: Debt Payoff and Budgeting App

What is PocketGuard?

PocketGuard is a budgeting app that was founded in 2015. Since then, it has helped people lower over $20 million in bills, save over $680 million, and pay off over $43 million in debts.

PocketGuard has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot, which is considered excellent.

Note that PocketGuard might offer targeted deals for its app that don’t appear on its main pricing page. 

Plans and pricing

PocketGuard doesn’t have plan tiers — only different prices depending on how often you pay.

Who is PocketGuard best for?

• People looking for a complete money management tool (not just budgeting help)
• People who want to understand their spending habits and cash flow better
• People who are working to get out of debt

We recommend PocketGuard for people who want to learn how to manage money with a complete picture of their finances, from their everyday spending and budgeting to their net worth and debt. It’ll give you a more comprehensive view of your finances than many other budgeting apps, as long as you’re willing to connect a lot of accounts (and PocketGuard allows unlimited linked accounts). We can see it being especially useful if you’re working to pay off debt.

If you want to learn more about where your money goes, we strongly recommend PocketGuard. It’s one of the better platforms we’ve reviewed for giving you a detailed view of not only your spending but also your cash flow, and the reporting and analytics may be really helpful if you’ve tried and failed to wrap your head around and curb your spending before.

Who is not a good fit for PocketGuard?

We don’t necessarily recommend PocketGuard for the bill negotiation and subscription cancellation features. For that, we prefer Rocket Money since it offers a free version and the potential for lower monthly prices. But if you’re already paying for PocketGuard, these aren’t bad features.

PocketGuard is a user-friendly app for the most part, but it has a lot going on, and brand-new budgeters might be overwhelmed by the platform. If you want an app with a simpler dashboard — especially if saving is your priority — you might prefer Simplifi.

How does PocketGuard work?

Budgeting

PocketGuard's features can seem a bit complicated at first glance if you’re new to budgeting apps, but the platform isn’t too hard to navigate.

Here are PocketGuard’s primary budgeting features:

• Customize your budget with your own categories, with the option to schedule recurring expenses.
• See how much money you have left to spend in a given month.
• Connect your bank accounts so the PocketGuard software can analyze and track your transactions.

You can also manually add transactions to PocketGuard if you’d rather not connect your accounts, which not every budgeting app will let you do.

Spending insights

The Insights tab breaks down your spending with visual reports, including graphs and pie charts. For example, you’ll see exactly how much you spent on insurance and what proportion of your budget went to dining out in a given month.

This feature is great for figuring out where you’re spending money and looking for opportunities to cut back. However, you’ll want to make a concerted effort to use it since PocketGuard won’t make suggestions about your spending. However, the app will send you alerts if you’re at risk of overspending based on the budget you’ve set or if you have a scheduled bill coming up.

Debt payoff plan

The PocketGuard budgeting app has a debt payoff plan feature that can quickly take your existing debt from connected accounts and formulate a plan to pay it off.

Here’s how the process works.

1. Select the account(s) with debt that you want to pay off, including your annual percentage rates (APRs) and minimum payment amounts.
2. Choose your debt payoff budget or how much you want to put toward your debt each month.
3. Decide whether you want to start this month or next.
4. Choose between a debt avalanche method by paying off debt with the highest interest rates first or the debt snowball method by paying off debt with the lowest balance first.
5. Start your debt payoff plan.

You don’t need an app to create a debt payoff strategy, but we think this is one of the strongest features PocketGuard offers. We like how easily it incorporates your connected debt accounts and gives you detailed solutions on how to pay them off, and this might be an especially good option for anyone struggling with repaying their debt and facing the threat of missed payments.

Bill negotiation and subscription cancellation

If you connect bank accounts to the PocketGuard app, it works on detecting your bills and helps you track them. It also reminds you when they’re due or overdue, and you can get help negotiating lower rates. The platform works with Billshark and claims an average success rate of 80% for the cell phone, WiFi, and cable bills it helps to negotiate. This isn’t guaranteed to work, but there’s no harm in trying it out if you’re already paying for PocketGuard anyway.

Another similar service that PocketGuard offers is subscription tracking and cancellation. The app uses an algorithm to find your subscriptions by scanning for recurring bills from certain providers, and then it walks you through how to cancel any you’re ready to “cut the cord” for. While this might not seem like a major value add for some, I know I’d be more likely to cancel services I’m paying for but not using if they were all laid out and I saw how easy it was to cancel. Other apps that offer similar services include Rocket Money, Hiatus, and Trim.

Savings goals

If your main goal is to save money, you can set specific and realistic goals using this feature.

1. Auto Tracking: You link a bank account to your goal so you can track your savings based on your account balance.
2. Manual Tracking: You manually assign transactions to your goal and track your savings based on the sum of the assigned transactions.

With the goals feature, you choose the target amount, due date, and monthly contribution. PocketGuard will monitor your progress and notify you of contributions and whether your goal is off track, completed, or failed.

Fraud detection

PocketGuard checks the activity on your connected bank accounts against its database to see if anything appears suspicious or inconsistent. If it detects any suspicious activity, you’ll be notified by email and an in-app notification. This feature is pretty unique for a budgeting app, but most checking accounts and credit cards include it as a free service these days, anyway.

PocketGuard alternatives

If PocketGuard doesn’t seem like the right fit for you, consider Rocket Money or Simplifi.

Rocket Money

Rocket Money has unique features you won’t find in most budgeting apps, including bill negotiation and subscription cancellation assistance. If these cost-cutting features and the ability to uncover hidden expenses appeal to you in PocketGuard, we’d recommend trying Rocket Money first because it can cost less overall. Bill negotiation is included in the free version of the app, but you’ll need to pay for the premium version to access features like help canceling subscriptions, unlimited budget categories, and net worth tracking.

Rocket Money Premium has a pay-what-you-can price of $6 to $12 per month, while PocketGuard is $6.25 to $12.99 monthly. We like the fact that Rocket Money offers a free version at all, unlike PocketGuard.

Sign up for Rocket Money or read our Rocket Money review to learn more.

Simplifi

Simplifi is a budgeting app that helps you track your spending and savings goals. At $2.99 a month, it’s much cheaper than PocketGuard if you want a simple expense tracker and savings assistant. Many features are similar between Simplifi and PocketGuard, including the ability to track your net worth, debt repayment, and spending on a granular, customizable level.

However, Simplifi stands out for its focus on saving, with a visual goal-tracking interface for this, something PocketGuard could do better. If you’re into heavy-duty spending and cash flow analytics, go with PocketGuard. But if you just want a budgeting app to show you how you’re doing on saving and what you can spend, we’d pick Simplifi. This app has detailed reports, too, but its regular dashboard is a little cleaner and nicer for quick checkups.

Sign up for Simplifi or read our Quicken Simplifi review to learn more.

FAQs

Bottom line

We recommend PocketGuard if you want an app with advanced money management features, including debt repayment plans and detailed insights into your spending. PocketGuard isn’t the cheapest budgeting app, but it’s also not a simple expense tracker.

Learn More

Consolidates finances in one place and automatically tracks real estate value

Uncovers forgotten subscriptions to cancel and negotiates bills

Supports tracking trial subscriptions

Automates moving money into a savings account

Provides credit monitoring and insights

Low cost for premium features at $6 for the monthly plan or $4 a month for the annual plan