Money is central to many people’s new year resolutions – whether it’s trying to save more, organising what you have already, or improving your spending or saving habits. If you have promised to tackle your finances this year, there are lots of tools and apps that can help you achieve your goal. Here are 26 to help you in 2026.
Feeling brave? This AI-powered tool will tell you how old you look and how much people of the same age typically have saved in their pension – it could make you very happy, or be doubly troubling. It looks at your face, guesses how old you are and shows you the average pension savings for people of that age. When one Guardian Money writer gave it a go, he was pleased to have his age estimated at 47 – a decade younger than his actual years. The app said he was told that the typical pension savings for a 47-year-old were worth £75,500, while for a 57-year-old the figure was £124,800. The Scottish Widows app will then let you use your own figures to show you how much you are on track to retire on and how to boost that.
There are only a few weeks until the 31 January deadline to file self-assessment tax returns for the 2024-25 tax year, but millions of Britons still haven’t done theirs. It won’t take away all of the pain, but the HM Revenue and Customs app could help you get the job done faster. You can use it to access vital information, from your self-assessment tax reference number to details of your employment income. It has lots of other useful features – for example, you can set a reminder to make a self-assessment payment. HMRC’s website has details of what you will need to access the app.
This “100% independent” app helps you make healthier choices about where you spend your money. You scan the barcodes of food and cosmetic products and it gives each item a score based on nutritional quality or ingredient safety and, where possible, suggests healthier alternatives. The app is free to download but there is a paid-for version with extra features such as offline scanning and dietary preference alerts. Similar apps include Open Food Facts, which provides detailed nutrition and allergen data using a community-run database. Fooducate focuses more on nutrition education and diet tracking.
The charity Turn2us offers a free and confidential benefits calculator that helps you find out if you are entitled to any financial support. It asks questions about your income and savings, housing costs and household circumstances, then provides a tailored list of possible entitlements, along with links to the official sites where you can begin a claim. Turn2us also has a “grants search” tool where you can find out if you might be able to get financial help from a charity or organisation. These funds are sometimes available to people who have worked in certain occupations or have particular health conditions.
This whizzy tool on the MoneySavingExpert website lets you enter how many premium bonds you have and a time frame, and it will predict your winnings. When we tried it, it said that with average luck someone with £5,000 of premium bonds (roughly the average holding) could expect to win roughly £775 over a five-year period. The odds in the calculator are based on the prize distribution for the most recent draw, which changes slightly each month, so the site says this should only be seen as “a very good estimate”. You can compare your predicted returns with the interest you would earn on a savings account and with inflation and see if you are making the best of your savings – currently it shows taxpayers would be better off in a top-paying cash Isa.
