An allowance, a part-time wage or a first salary does not need a wealth platform. It needs a record honest enough to show where it actually went, and a split function for the four people who owe you for the taxi.
A first ledger
Worth tracking from day one
In short
NetWorth+ is a free Android app suitable for students and people in their first job. It tracks small everyday spending, splits costs with friends and keeps the balance owed to you, and builds a net worth figure from whatever you have — which at this stage is usually a bank account, some cash and a few people who owe you money. There are no advertisements, no subscription and no bank login. It can read bank alert SMS on the phone with your permission so card spends record themselves.
Cost
Free, no ads, no trial
Bank login
Never required
Splitting
Built in, with balances
Age
18 and over
The problem
It goes in twenty-dirham and two-hundred-rupee amounts that individually never feel worth recording.
The month starts with a known amount and ends with a fraction of it, and the honest answer to where it went is that you do not know. Not because you were reckless, but because forty small transactions leave no impression and a bank statement is a wall of merchant names three weeks after the fact.
The second leak is social. You paid for the group taxi, the birthday cake, the shared subscription. Each is small, none is written down, and by the end of a term you are a few hundred out of pocket without ever having decided to be.
How it helps
Card alerts from your bank can be read on the device and arrive with the amount and merchant already filled in. The whole objection to expense tracking is the typing, and this removes most of it.
Group taxis, shared flats, the subscription everyone uses. Balances carry forward instead of being settled by whoever brings it up first.
A laptop, a flight, a first emergency fund. Progress towards something specific is considerably more motivating than a budget that only tells you to stop.
One month of expenses is the standard advice and it is a large number when you are earning very little. Start with whatever a week costs. The habit is the part that compounds, and having any buffer at all is the difference between a bad month and a borrowed one.
Where this applies
Common among students and first-job earners across the Gulf — university in Dubai, Sharjah or Abu Dhabi, a first role in Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha or Manama, or studies in India funded from a parent working in the region. The app reads local currencies and bank alert formats in each market.
NetWorth+ also covers India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and the United States. Currency handling is not limited to the list above — three-decimal dinars and zero-decimal currencies are treated correctly rather than being forced into two decimal places.
Questions
Keep reading
If you share a flat, this is the version with rent cheques in it.
Read moreSplits, approvals and balances that carry forward.
Read moreLimits that hold, and goals that draw from real money.
Read moreWork out a split in the browser, no sign-up, nothing stored.
Read moreIf the part-time work is delivery, start here instead.
Read moreWhat the figure means when you are starting from almost nothing.
Read moreThe habit is easier to build on a first salary than on a fifth one, and the record is worth more the longer it runs.
Android. No bank login. No ads. Message reading is optional and off until you switch it on.