Top 5 Must-Have Financial Apps for the iPhone & Android

1. TaxCaster from TurboTax

This comprehensive tool estimates your tax refund by taking everything into account: charitable donations, education spending, retirement savings and more. Having a visualization of the dollars that came and went with an MPH needle is a bit intimidating, although it does force a new perspective on your budget.

2. Wikinvest Portfolio Manager 

A complete package. Wikinvest connects you to your investment portfolio in a navigable motherboard, providing a stream of stock updates and market data, brokerage fees, performance calculation, and comprehensive analytics. One of the coolest things about this app is it's user experience, though. It doesn't assume you already know how to make heads and tails out of stock data, like a lot of other financial apps.

3. E*TRADE Mobile Pro by E*TRADE

The first 60 days of this app are free, up to $500. It's a deal when you consider how indispensable E*TRADE has become in the day-to-day life of most investors and stockbrokers. You can also buy and sell stock with this app from Apple's iPad and Blackberry mobile phones

.

4. Pageonce Personal Finance

This app comes highly rated in the iTunes shop, and it's pretty simple to see why. The Pageonce personal finance app is an investment & bill-tracker that gives incredible insight into your budget. Take your mobile phone bill, for instance. Anybody can build a spreadsheet and keep track of their bills and due dates, but Pageonce gives you insight on your spending on text messaging, minutes, roaming charges, downloads and apps. It might seem a bit Scrooge McDucky, but Pageonce may very well illuminate your budget to reveal chunks of unused utility that you could be saving or investing instead. 

5. ShoeBoxed

If you're bad about holding onto receipts after business lunches, ShoeBoxed is the kind of app you'll shortly find yourself relying on. Simply snap a photo of your receipt (with your iPhone's camera, of course) and Shoebox will take it from there, adding the data to your expense reports. Email reports as attachments or export them as CSV, Excel, PDF and XL8 files. One of the perks of Shoeboxed Mobile is its business card scanner, which reads business card photos and saves the information to your list of contacts.