Is Honeydue the Best Budgeting App for Couples?

There’s strength in numbers, especially when it comes to your finances as a couple. Doing your finances together can make you stronger and help you better plan for financial goals. However, putting your finances together can be complicated. If you’re like many people, you’re bringing many years’ and accounts’ worth of data to the relationship.

What can you do to easily bring together your finances, make them less complicated, and work on your financial goals as a couple? The Honeydue app can help.

What is Honeydue & How Does It Work?

Honeydue is a financial app that allows you and your partner to put all of your financial information in one place so you can see how much you’re spending and what you’re spending it on. You can choose what information to share, making it convenient for people who cohabitate and share some household expenses.

When you’re connected to Honeydue, you add your checking, savings, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts through encrypted connections and mark what balance and transaction information you want your partner to see.

Honeydue tracks your balances and activity for each of your accounts, categorizing each transaction to help you understand your spending habits. You can chat with your partner about transactions within the app’s chat feature. The budget section paints a visual picture of your monthly spending. The calendar feature lets you set up bill reminders which trigger notifications to help you pay them on time.

Honeydue currently makes money through a tip jar feature. If you choose, you can set a recurring monthly tip of $1 to $10. Tipping reminders pop up from time to time when you open the app.

What’s Good About Honeydue?

One Place for Your Accounts

It’s convenient to put all of your accounts in one place because you can quickly understand where your money goes each month. Most popular banks are easy to connect, but you can also add accounts manually.

Spending Alerts Help Identify Fraud

While I try to minimize the alerts I get on my phone — and Honeydue defaults to sending you a lot of alerts — Honeydue alerted us to a fraudulent charge on my husband’s debit card that we wouldn’t have caught until much later. Who knows how much would’ve been drained out of our account by then?

Great Flexibility Within the Category Feature

The Honeydue categorization feature is pretty flexible. It has 11 preset categories, but you can customize those and add more. Even better is the option to assign a transaction to multiple categories. This is especially great when you get cash from an ATM that you spend at several places.

Split Expenses and Pay Your Partner Within the App

If you and your partner keep more of your finances separate, you can split the transaction and settle up with your partner by quickly connecting to Venmo or Paypal through Honeydue.

What’s Bad About Honeydue?

Only for iOS or Android

It’s great to be able to check your financial information on the go, but the small phone screen isn’t optimal for everything and if you don’t have a compatible tablet, that’s no good. If you have a lot of transactions, prepare for lots of scrolling. Because there’s no desktop feature, I couldn’t use the information in more robust ways.

Budget Only Shows Monthly Spending

While I tested the app, I was able to review six months of spending data. However, you can only see monthly spending and you can’t easily slice data in more than one way. If you want to look at a bigger picture than the day-to-day, this app is limited.

Categorization Isn’t Intuitive

Any spending is a “purchase,” so seeing notifications that I made a “large purchase” on my mortgage payment didn’t make sense.

Honeydue’s default categories can be too overarching. For example, “Food & Drink” covers both groceries and eating out. Clothing fell under a large category called “Shopping & Fun.” To get specific, you have to spend time to create customized categories. Be prepared to recategorize a lot of transactions until Honeydue’s software learns your habits.

Transactions to savings accounts get listed as “Transfers,” which can be difficult to break out from other types of transfers to get a good understanding of your overall savings picture.

Doesn’t Eliminate the Need to Log In to Your Online Banking Account

Online bill payments are listed as “Preauthorized Debit.” Luckily, the specific transaction is more detailed. Checks, however, are only listed as “Check.” I had to log into my bank account to find out the check details so I could categorize the spending.

Is Honeydue Worth It?

Honeydue is useful if you and your partner are starting from scratch and trying to get a handle on your financial picture. It’s really helpful if you split a lot of expenses because it’s so easy to track and settle up within the app.

However, if you’re further along in your relationship and can have healthy conversations about your financial matters, the clunkier parts and limitations of this app will likely be too frustrating to make it worthwhile.

Want more reviews? Check out our finance blogs.

Description: A couple using the Honeydue app on their smartphone to track their finances together.