Clarity Money Review (2024)

Given how easy it's getting to digitally trace financial transactions down to the cup of coffee you charge to your credit card, keeping tabs on your personal finances has never been easier. The more your transactions are logged, the easier it is to have a record of them, categorize them, and analyze them. Clarity Money is one of many personal finance apps that, like our Editors' Choice Mint, consolidates your financial accounts and transactions into one app from which you see both the fine details of your spending habits and the larger picture of your financial health. Although it has one or two features that Mint does not have, Clarity Money is not nearly as fine-tuned as Mint. More importantly, when I tested the app, I saw some red flags that made me feel uncomfortable using it.

How Is Clarity Money Free?

Many free personal finance apps make money by showing you advertisem*nts for financial products and services. Clarity Money is no different. Like many other services, including Mint and Credit Karma, Clarity Money shows you highly targeted ads based on information it has gathered about you and your finances. Clarity Money can see your credit card transactions, so it knows how much you pay in interest and can therefore show you an ad for a credit card with a lower interest rate. When Clarity Money asks if you're interested in creating better habits related to saving money, it shows you an offer to open a savings account. When you sign up for a service as a result of the ad, Clarity Money gets a referral payment.

While many personal finance apps use a similar business model, not all do. LearnVest , for example, has a freemium model under which you get limited tools for tracking your finances for free, but you have to pay for a premium membership to get more tools and recommendations from a financial planner. LearnVest isn't cheap. It charges a $299 initiation fee, plus $19 per month.

A few other personal finance apps instead charge monthly, yearly, or transactional fees for services offered by the company or their partners, such as an investment account or savings account. Qapital ($0.00 at Apple.com) , StashInvest, and Acorns all come to mind.

Clarity Money's Services

Clarity Money keeps tabs on line item transactions across all your financial accounts, as well as giving you visibility into the total balances of those accounts and your overall financial status. It's available on Android, iOS, and as a web app, although from the design of the web app, you can clearly tell that it was created with a mobile-first approach. Given the popularity of mobile finance apps, it's not surprising.

A signature feature in Clarity Money calls attention to recurring charges, such as monthly subscriptions, bills, and fees, and it prompts you to review them and cancel any services you don't want. Perhaps you've been paying an online streaming company or local gym a monthly fee, despite the fact that you haven't used the service in ages. Clarity Money draws attention to this type of charge and encourages you to review them and decide whether to cancel the accounts.

Clarity Money also offers you the option to open a savings account via the app. When you open this particular account, you can then use the app to move money from a linked account into the savings account. The terms of the account are not immediately apparent, and they don't become available to you until you start to go through the steps to open the account, dribbling out instead via tool tips, links to the app's Terms of Service and FAQs, and eventually a summary email that you receive after you get the account. The fact that the terms are not more apparent is red flag number one for me.

I asked representatives of Clarity Money for more details (because I did not want to complete all the steps and actually open a new account while testing the app), and they explained that the result is you get a no-fee, non-interest-bearing savings account with Wells Fargo. All these details should be made clear and apparent much earlier in the process. I am shocked that they were so hard to find. I am also disappointed that the account offered is not interest bearing.

As mentioned, when you open the Wells Fargo savings account, you can then use Clarity Money to initiate deposits into it. Many other personal finance apps do not allow you to move money between accounts using them for security purposes. Clarity Money does not have this restriction. In fact, Clarity Money users formerly had all kinds of abilities to move money among their accounts, although representatives told me that they are sunsetting these capabilities, in part for security reasons. I suppose it's good the company is getting rid of that functionality, but it didn't sit well with me that the app had them in the first place. That's red flag number two.

What Does Clarity Money Do?

At the more general level, Clarity Money tries to do exactly what Mint.com does, which is to say it shows you both the fine details and grand scale of your personal finances. It connects directly to your financial accounts, pulls information from them, and consolidates all that data in one place. It also automatically categorizes your spending, with a reasonable amount of success. You can easily see how much money you spend on food, entertainment, travel, bills, shopping, and so forth.

For example, in the app, you quickly see your net worth or total amount of debt. It also shows if you spend more money than you make. Are there any categories of spending that are out of whack compared to what you would like them to be? For the current month and to date, is your spending in alignment with your monthly income?

Optionally, Clarity Money can pull your credit score from Experian. To get this service, you must provide some additional details about yourself, such as date of birth and social security number. Checking your credit in this way does not damage your credit score, as it's considered a soft query. Mint offers free credit scores, too, alongside a credit report. (Mint doesn't advertise it as such, but it does in fact give you a detailed credit report.) WalletHub ($0.00 at WalletHub) specializes in both credit scores and credit reports. The free services monitors changes to your credit history as well, sending you emails or other alerts anytime there's a change. Credit Karma also specializes in credit scores and reports.

Design and Details

Clarity Money is clearly designed for mobile devices. Once you set up an account and connect some of your credit cards and banks (more on security in a moment), the app displays cards with different information about your financial standing, history, or spending trends.

For example, one card shows a list of your accounts and each one's current balance. Another card shows a graph with your spending so far this month against projected income. Yet another shows a summary of how much money you've spent "in the last few days," a rather vague report given the app's purpose.

When you click on a card, it increases in size and usually gives you more detail about the information. One of the cards shows a list of recurring charges alongside the amount. My card included a subscription to Netflix, as well as two standard insurance bills. The point of this card is to highlight subscription services that you might want to cancel or perhaps unnecessary recurring fees. In my case, the information wasn't helpful. I still use Netflix avidly, and I'm not about to stop paying my bills. It would be worthwhile to have an option to exclude recurring charges from appearing here if they are nonnegotiable and necessary payments.

Like Mint, Clarity Money labels line item transactions by their category, although Clarity Money uses many fewer categories, and you can't customize them the way you can in Mint. For example, Clarity Money lumps all food purchases together, no matter whether they are hefty bar tabs, groceries, or $5 lattes. Mint separates alcohol, groceries, restaurants, fast food, and so forth. If Mint doesn't have a specific category that you want to track, you can create it, which you can't do in Clarity Money. Mint also lets you assign a budget to any category. I, for example, try to limit my coffee shop purchases to $40 per month. Mint is adept at watching my spending in a category that's so specific, whereas Clarity Money can't do any of that.

Clarity Money lacks many other features found in Mint, including the ability log cash spending and cash income. It also doesn't let you split transactions. For example, let's say I spend $100 at a clothing store. I bought a gift for someone worth $50, and the other half I spent on personal purchases. I would want to split the categorization so that it doesn't look like I spent $100 on myself. Mint gives you tools to divide the total of any transaction into parts and categorize them separately. Clarity Money doesn't.

Is Clarity Money Secure?

Is it safe and secure to use Clarity Money? The company behind the app Money states that it uses multi-level security mechanisms, including firewalls and VPN to protect the data it collects. Data transmissions use Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 and 256-bit encryption, and storage uses AES-256 encryption. The company also reports that it uses strict data access policies and controls.

Clarity Money does not, however, participate in any independent security verification, such as the Norton Secured program (which both Mint and LearnVest use) or McAfee Secure (which LearnVest also uses). These verification programs provide consumers with independent verification of basic security structures. Clarity Money representatives did mention that the app uses third parties to verify other information, such as to check whether users are who they claim to be.

At the level of your individual device, you can use a passcode, Touch ID and Face ID on supported iOS phones and tablets to unlock the app. On Android, PIN and fingerprint IDs are supported.

Something did catch my attention while I was testing the app that did not leave me feeling 100 percent confident about the service. One of my banks uses an access code rather than my personal password for third-party access. In other words, when I want to use a personal finance app to obtain read-only data from my account, the bank is aware that the app should have limited access, and it provides an access code in lieu of me having to enter my password. Not all banks provide this service, although in my opinion they should.

In any event, I was surprised when I went to authenticate this account and Clarity Money never triggered a request for the access code. Instead, it asked for my password. In the past, the request for an access code has always appeared with other personal finance apps. When I asked the Clarity Money team about this specific problem, the representatives said they were unaware of it and would have to look into it. That's red flag number three for me.

In the end, deciding whether it's safe to use any personal finance app is a matter of opinion. There's almost always a tradeoff with free services. There are always going to be risks involved with entering personal information into an online application. There is almost always going to be some granting of rights to anonymize, aggregate, and sell or share data about you. However, the value you get from the app or service may be enough to outweigh the potential risks. Deciding whether that's the case for you is a personal decision.

Doesn't Earn Our Trust

At first blush, Clarity Money seems like any other free personal finance app that consolidates your financial transactions and accounts into one place where you can better analyze them both in detail and on a grand scale. But in testing the service, I saw too many red flags to feel truly comfortable using it. It simply didn't earn my trust. Mint remains the Editors' Choice among personal finance tools for tracking and analyzing spending. Trust issues aside, superior budgeting options, bill payment features, and many more features for managing your financial health make Mint the better option.