7 Personal Finance Tools To Curb Spending

Americans’ pocketbooks are hurting as essentials like gas become more expensive and fears of a possible recession grow. 

Half of American adults are more stressed about their finances than they were a year ago, and 70% feel they are just managing, struggling or falling behind, according to CNBC and SurveyMonkey’s Quarterly Affordability Survey. The findings, published on April 10, were the result of a survey of 3,494 adults between March 23 and March 25.

If you’re like the many Americans who feel like they’re struggling, one way to alleviate some stress is to cut back on some unnecessary spending. To help you get started, CNBC Select compiled seven tools that can help you curb spending right now. 

Why spend money on something you’re not using? Americans pay hundreds of dollars each year for unwanted subscriptions that they forget about, a recent Yahoo Finance study showed. 

Rocket Money will help you put that money back in your pocket by tracking and canceling these subscriptions. Not only does that save you money, but it saves you time. 

It also tracks your spending categories, recurring expenses and accounts to give you an instant overview of your finances and can help you spend smarter in the future. 

PocketGuard — which offers its basic plan for free — uses income, expenses and saving goals to advise you how much you should spend each day and on what. It will also send notifications if you’re close to or reach your spending limit. That alert may make it harder to go through with an impulse purchase. 

For $5 per month, budget app Oportun will automatically withdraw funds from your bank account based on your savings goals. Oportun claims it helps users save $1,800 on average each year. 

To be sure, some savings accounts will automatically withdraw money from your checking account each month without charging a fee. But Select likes Oportun because you can connect multiple accounts involved in your savings and spending budget in one place. 

Cash back credit cards allow you to do this. Our top pick for a no-annual-fee cash back card is the Citi Double Cash, which will earn you 2% cash back on every purchase (1% when you buy and 1% when you pay off your balance) and 5% back on hotels, car rentals and attractions booked through Citi Travel.

We like that with this option, you can earn rewards on whatever you spend. To maximize what you’re able to earn, pay your balance in full each month to get the full 2% back and avoid paying interest. 

All loan consolidation loans do that, but Upgrade stands out for its range of repayment options and loan terms from two to seven years. If you need to stop spending a certain amount on debt repayment every month when money is tight, you can choose the lowest payment option and make your debt repayment much more manageable. 

You can block your targeted ads with an ad blocker extension like uBlock Origin, which will stop ads and protect your wallet and privacy.

You can also manage targeted ads by changing your personal settings in an app for free. For example, on Instagram, you can go to the menu and, under account settings, click ad preferences, then ad experience, and manage info. There, you’ll see options to manage whether Meta’s partners can see your activity, whether certain companies can give you ads and what categories advertisers can reach you based on.

You can also limit ad tracking in your phone’s settings.

Flipp is a great option. It works with companies from Costco to Whole Foods, along with Home Depot and JCPenney, to help you find the best deal on any given item. 

Start by creating your shopping list and entering your zip code in the app. From there, it will pull up options in your area and see if any coupons are available. 

The data referenced in this article were results from the CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly Money Survey on Affordability released in April 2026.

Here is the methodology SurveyMonkey used to come to these findings: “The SurveyMonkey study was conducted March 23, 2026 to March 25, 2026 among a sample of 3,494 adults in the U.S. Respondents for this survey were selected from a non-probability online panel. The modeled error estimate for this survey is plus or minus 2.0 percentage points. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the overall demographic composition of the United States.”

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