Having proper plans and records regarding your life and activities is a very important thing nowadays. A good plan will help you focus on essential tasks and in the event that you ever have to prove your identity or some other fact about yourself, having the right documentation will save you from a lot of stress, especially if you’re away from your own country.

Thankfully, your smartphone is a treasure trove of ways by which you can make planning and keeping a comprehensive record of your life much more convenient.

Finances Tracker

How you spend the money you have is going to be one of the biggest determinants of how things will progress in your life. With the many finance tracking apps available to download for free or a small fee, you’ll be able to set a budget and track your income and expenses to make sure you don’t overspend. Some of them will even give you alerts to remind you not to cross a preset threshold.

Document Backups

When it comes to crucial documents, saving them on the cloud through one of the popular phone apps like Google Drive or OneDrive is a good way to ensure that you won’t have any hassle regarding your identity anywhere. Even though you can get a replacement birth certificate conveniently, for instance, keeping a backup will reduce the likelihood of you needing to. With this though, you’ll need to be conscious of cyber-security so your important documents won’t be hacked.

Note Apps

With apps like Evernote and other similar ones, you can save virtually anything to your phone in an organized and easily referenced manner. From text notes to photos and videos, you can create an organized space where you’ll be able to find any information you need on your private or business endeavors without any hassle like what you’d have to deal with if you had scattered your notes around different apps or notebooks

To-Do List

From the humble sticky note, today’s to-do list apps have a slew of features that you can configure to suit every purpose. You can put tasks in much more conveniently by connecting them to other apps like your email or calendar, and then set up a reminders schedule to ensure that you do not forget or get distracted from what you’re supposed to be doing at any time.

Automate Tasks

In planning your life and setting goals for yourself on how to get where you want, one of the most important tools at your disposal is the power of your smartphone to automate many tasks that would otherwise take you lots of time to do. Social media, for instance: You can schedule posts to go out automatically, and you can even use IFTT to handle the scheduling from beginning to end. You can also set up analytics for your different activities so as to see which ones you need to focus on and which ones you need to modify or stop completely.

If your phone is not measuring up to standard, it’s time to get a smartphone and start living your live the smart way. And your old phones doesn’t have to constitute nuisance around your home. You can sell them off for cash instead. If you need some ideas on how best to do this, Sell Compare have some cool resources that help you get the most out of your old phone.

Have you been tempted to join the growing band of amateur Forex traders? If so, it’s hardly surprising. In a world where good investments with substantial yields are hard to come by, the Forex market is a tantalizing opportunity. With currency pairs existing in a constant world of change, there is always the opportunity to make money for those who know what they are doing.

Of course, knowing what you are doing is the major caveat there. For every winner there is a loser, and those who blunder in blindly are likely to get bitten where it hurts. Clearly, you need to take a logical and strategic approach to trading, and to get certain things in place before you begin.

This brings us to the Android apps. While stockbrokers in the traditional sense do still exist, many amateur traders are turning to smart apps to deliver the insights and advice they need when deciding on that next trade. Even those who still rely on human advice will need a trading platform through which they can interact with both the market and their broker. So before you can start playing the markets, you really need the right app on your smartphone. Here are four of the most popular.

MetaTrader 4

This is the app that has become almost synonymous with trading, having been around in desktop form since 2005. When you give it a try, you can see how it has gained its reputation as the best mobile trading platform for Forex. And best of all, the Android app is free to download.

MetaTrader 4 is ideal for the serious investor who wants to get into the nitty gritty of trading – it features 50 different market indicators and a whole additional range of tools that you can use to get the best possible picture of how a particular currency pair is going to behave.

But it is also ideal for beginners. You can open a demo account to learn the ropes and make all those beginners’ errors before you start trading for real, or if you prefer a slightly more hands-off approach, the app provides a shared space where you can interact with your real-world broker and let him take care of the trading activity on your behalf.

Robinhood

A mythical character famed for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor is an interesting inspiration for a Forex trading app, but then again, this is no everyday app. Developed by a team of students from Stanford University, the app is clearly aimed at those who like the idea of getting something for nothing, and much has been made of its commission-free trading.

Undoubtedly this is what lies behind its appeal to novice traders, and the fact that those who download it have an average age of just 26 says it all.

The app does everything you ask of it, but don’t expect tools and functionality on the level of MetaTrader 4. As a cheap and cheerful trading option, it has a growing following, though, and the developers are now looking to monetize it, having released a premium version in 2016.

E*Trade Mobile

Anyone who has any interest in trading will be aware of the E*Trade brand. The company was instrumental in bringing trading to the man or woman in the street back in the 1980s, and has remained an important player ever since.

The Android app is certainly slick, and contains functionality that many traders will find appealing, including voice search as standard, Apple Watch compatibility and a choice of live streams from finance channels such as CNBC.

All those bells and whistles come at a cost, however. The commissions per trade are far higher than most apps, while when you get into the detail, the trading tools themselves fall short of the likes of MetaTrader 4.

TradeHero

At the outset, we talked about how important it is to go into trading knowing what you are doing. This is an app that will help you become an expert trader without having to risk any of your own money. Of course, you can do exactly the same thing in, for example, MetaTrader 4’s demo mode, but TradeHero takes the whole gamification approach to a new level.

It works in much the same way as a fantasy sport app. Starting out with $100,000, you can build a fantasy portfolio and compete against other users. The best performers get their names up in lights and appear at the top of the leaderboard.

The app also provides a platform for real trading with real money, but for most, it is the virtual aspect that makes this one a little different from the rest, and it even has a following among experienced traders, who use it to try out innovative trading strategies in a zero-risk environment.