Many people want to tidy up their expenses and get some more clarity on their budget and overall finances. There are a lot of such income tracker apps around, some being good, others not that much, but usually they are not that exciting. A couple of days, however, I found an interesting app, I almost want to call it a game, with cute graphics and a friendly UI that just flows well.
I am talking about Fortune City (love the name), which is a gamified finance tracker. Much like Sleep Town, you can build your own city, based on how you use the app. The app was developed by Fourdesire from Taipei in Taiwan.
What happens in Fortune City?
As you start using Fortune City, there’s nothing but a town hall and a builder’s hub for your construction workers. By registering what you spent money on, you create additional buildings. Every day you can build a maximum of five buildings like that, and the structures vary, depending on the category of your spending. If you buy food, it will create a small food booth in your city, if you register a bus ticket, it will place a little station there.
You can also freely move your buildings in Fortune City so you can design a layout that makes sense to you. If you have more structures of the same type, you can merge them into the next level building of its particular class.
As your city grows it also becomes more popular with people, and over time you’ll be able to get them to move into your town. In Fortune City, you generate money as you place people in buildings and assign them to jobs that match their skills. Just like in real life, right? Well, almost.
If you track your income and spendings well, Fortune City is able to give you a very simple, but useful, analytics of your finances. For people who don’t trust app develops enough to provide them with their financial details, or access to their accounts, like a PayPal API connection, Fortune City is useful, because all the numbers are entered by yourself, and don’t get harvested out of a data connection.
For students and everybody else
I feel that the setup in Fortune City has a focus on students, but I also managed to find my way around and build my own city. It’s still small and rather cute, but I like the feeling of tracking my spendings accurately like this and adding more buildings every day. The app is free to use, but there are some aspects that you could spend real money on, such as increasing the daily building limit or other doing other cosmetic changes. Sometimes a town inhabitant comes asking you to watch an ad, but there are no consequences of not doing so.
Languages available are English, Korean, Japanese and both traditional and simplified Chinese. The app also lets you record in various currencies and can differentiate between cash and credit card expenses. I hope this recommendation was useful to you. If you started using it as well, makes sure to share your city’s screenshots with us on social media or drop us a comment below. Have fun keeping up with your finances!
YouTube: Fortune City – Track your spending, grow a city!
Photo credit: Fourdesire
