Budgeting and keeping track of the way we spend our money can be difficult. Checking our bank accounts shouldn't be shocking, but sometimes the swipes of our debit or credit cards add up in a way we didn't expect. Using the Mint app, senior caregivers can connect multiple bank accounts and loans to the app to monitor spending and create a personal budget to meet their financial goals in 2014. 

Mint asks new users for information on all applicable accounts, including checking and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, etc. It then creates a personal summary of the user's finances, which shows how their debts compared to their actual money in the bank. Users can then set various goals to pay off debts and test various monthly payment amounts to see how long it will take to break even. 

Mint also breaks down all charges to debit and credit accounts into various categories, including grocery, travel, fast food, restaurants, etc. to help users recognize exactly how they're spending their money. Caregivers can set goals for how much they'd like to spend on each category in a month, then see how their actual spending compares. This feature can be particularly useful for caregivers who help their senior clients shop for groceries and other items to monitor how much they're spending. 

Mint aso offers financial advice on how to make the most out of your investment and savings options to put you in the best financial situation long term and monitors users' credit scores. Overall, the app provides a very useful financial snapshot.

The Mint app is available for free for Apple products.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

The beginning of a new year brings New Years Resolutions to improve our lives. Eating healthier, exercising and keeping better track of budgets rank among the more common resolutions. Senior caregivers can incorporate wellness into their daily lives in 2014 using the Alive and Well app, which offers resources and tips to develop an overall healthy lifestyle. 

The home screen of the app shares a "Health Tip of the Day" which range from a suggested food to include in your diet to explaining the correlation between aging and lifestyle. To ensure healthy aging, the tip suggests seniors exercise and maintain a healthy diet. The app also features coupons and specials for the Alive and Well store, which is based in Ohio. Users can purchase items at the physical location or online for shipment if they live in a different part of the country. They offer gluten free, organic and vegan items for caregivers or their senior clients who may have dietary restrictions. 

Another portion of the app breaks down recipes into user-friendly categories such as Time Savers, Easy, Elegant Entrees, Macrobiotic, Delectable Desserts and Low Fat & Low Calorie. Once you select a category, you can browse through all the recipes until you find one that suits your needs. There is a vast variety of recipes featured- from Curried Split Pea Soup to Sauerkraut and Tempeh Skillet.

The various parts of the app connect well together and allow the overall user experience to flow. Even though the app is created by a store, it features wellness first and advertising for their products as a secondary thought, which leaves the main focus on living a healthy lifestyle.

The Alive and Well app is available for Apple and Android platforms.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

Music provides a soundtrack to our lives and we attach memories to songs. Senior caregivers can tune into the radio to hear today's latest hits, some classical music for relaxation, or some oldies that bring up good memories. The iHeartRadio app allows users to tune into radio stations both locally and nation wide as well as to create custom stations based off of a particular genre, artist or song. 

Caregivers can ask their senior clients about their favorite kind of music from their childhood or throughout their lives and use the iHeartRadio app to bring back old memories. Listening to music together may bring up stories that a senior client otherwise wouldn't think to share with you. Ask your senior client what genre or artist of music they enjoy and then open the iHeartRadio app. Users can browse stations across the nation by genre and see information about the stations before the listen, including the most recently played songs on that station to give listeners an idea of what specifically they'll hear if they tune in. Alternatively, caregivers can see all of the local stations in their city if they prefer to hear local news and ads along with their music.  Senior clients also may be interested in listening to a station from a particular city if they have loved ones who live there or if they lived there at some point in their lives.

If you'd prefer a customized stream of music to a live radio station, the iHeartRadio app also provides a streaming customized radio station option for its users. Simply type in an artist or song and the app will play similar music from its library. The wide variety of music in this app guarantees that there's a station for any user who would like to listen to music. 

The iHeartRadio app is available for free for Apple and Android platforms.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

The holidays bring friends and family together to celebrate and share memories together. Whether you're spending your holidays with a senior client or with family or friends, taking a few pictures can help preserve the memories for years to come. This week we posted a blog with tips about Caregiver Stress Relief. Taking photos at the holidays can provide reminders of good times for days in the future that may be particularly stressful. 

Using the BeFunky app, caregivers can edit the photos that they take directly on their phone. There's no need to transfer a photo from your phone to your computer to open it in a photo editing program there because the BeFunky app pulls the photo you'd like to edit directly from your phone's camera roll. Basic edits such as rotating, straightening or cropping a photo allow for users to clean up the original photo. 

More advanced edits such as brightness, sharpness and saturation allow for edits to the contents of the photo. Even if users aren't familiar with the various types of edits available, BeFunky makes it easy to click on an edit type from the selection bar at the bottom and play around with an edit type to see what it does and if it makes an enhancement to the original photo. The option of applying a filter to the photo with preexisting edits also gives the user the ability to quickly scroll through and click on different filters to see them applied to the photo and pick the best one. Adding a frame or some text to the photo also can add some final touches before saving the photo and exporting it to your camera roll to keep, share with friends via social media or send via email. 

The BeFunky app is available for free for Apple and Android platforms. 

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

Learning and using a foreign language engages the mind and switching from English to another language exercises the brain in a way that helps delay the onset of dementia. The "Learn Spanish" app by Mindsnacks teaches basic Spanish words and pronunciation for senior caregivers and their clients. 

As Spanish continues to become a more prominent language in the United States, some caregivers may have senior clients whose first language is Spanish. Those caregivers can use this app to learn the basics of the language if they don't already know it and practice their pronunciation with their senior clients. For seniors who don't speak a second language, this app provides stimulation to the part of the brain responsible for building up a "cognitive reserve," which prevents the onset of dementia. 

The app itself requires the user to create an account and asks for the user's experience level with speaking Spanish. Upon choosing the lowest level, it begins the game. The app displays a word in one language and then provides two choices for a matching word in the other language. For example, the Spanish word on top might be "Dos" and the two English words below it might be "Two" and "Three." The user must select "Two" to earn points as "Dos" is the Spanish word for "Two." 

The app makes this into a game, awarding points for each correct answer and ending the round when the user does not answer a question or chooses too many incorrect answers. After each round, it offers an evaluation of how well the user understands each of the words presented, with scores fluctuating and improving as the user plays more rounds. 

The basic version of the app is available for free for Apple products. 

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

Alzheimer's prevention requires an effort on the part of senior caregivers and their clients to keep their minds and bodies active as they age. No single cause of Alzheimer's can be found, though. The Brain Games app offers several valuable tips for seniors and caregivers on specific habits for daily life to help prevent Alzheimer's.

The title of the app is slightly perplexing as it highlights tips instead of actual games, but nonetheless provides useful information. The app features a very simple layout with the ability to pick a tip highlighted on a card and then flip it over to read more about it. Users can see that one of the first tips is to read a good book. If they flip the card over, they learn that reading draws on the imagination which forces the brain to make connections. Users then can easily move onto the next tip when they're done reading with a swipe of the screen. 

The free version of the app presents 11 tips for users, some of which include less common Alzheimer's prevention suggestions such as eating a protein based breakfast to fuel the brain and cutting back on alcohol. The app does lack depth in Alzheimer's education outside of these tips, though. Adding a section with information on how Alzheimer's develops and affects the brain would be useful for furthering caregiver and senior knowledge of the disease. This app is best used to offer tips and supplement information from other sources on Alzheimer's disease. 

The Brian Games App is available for free for Apple products.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

The weather affects decisions and plans in everyone's lives, but particularly for senior caregivers being prepared for inclement weather helps insure safety of their senior clients. For example, if snow with the potential for ice looms on the forecast, caregivers know that the risk of a senior client slipping and falling increases. The Weather Channel app provides up to date and detailed forecasts by the hour or day for up to ten days in advance so caregivers can be prepared.

As weather predictions fluctuate in the days leading up to the present day, the hourly and next 36 hour predictions in the app offer the most useful and accurate information. The hourly section provides a glimpse of the temperature and chance of precipitation for each hour of the day, so users can see if the morning is going to be sunny and clear but then around 3 pm the temperature drops and it will rain heavily. The 36 hours section shows more details on high and low temperatures for the day as well as information on any wind and type of precipitation. Knowing the details of the weather for the day can help caregiver know if they need to grab sunscreen or an umbrella before leaving the house, as well as how to dress for optimal comfort for that day.

Users can monitor the weather for several cities in the app, which is useful for setting your current city as the default and putting any other destinations as secondary. Just for fun, if your senior client has loved ones who live out of town, you can also add their cities to the app so your senior client can stay up to date on how the weather is treating them.

The Weather Channel app is available for free for Apple, Android and Windows products.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

Every week Caregiverlist features a new recipe to give our senior caregivers ideas for new meals and snacks to make for themselves or to share with their senior clients. In case caregivers have a taste for something specific or are looking for more recipe ideas, the SparkRecipes app provides a variety of healthy recipes. 

Browsing options for recipes within the app include searching by category or course, type of cuisine, dietary needs or type of occasion, such as a picnic or brunch. The dietary needs section includes recipe choices for gluten free, vegetarian, lactose free, etc. diets, which helps caregivers quickly narrow down potential recipes without needing to examine the individual ingredients in each one. This feature is particularly useful for caregivers whose clients have dietary restrictions set by their doctors. Likewise, the search by category proves useful if the user already has a particular ingredient such as chicken that he/she would like to feature in the recipe. A quick glance at the poultry category shows several chicken dish ideas such as chicken parmesan, chicken and broccoli casserole or orange chicken. Some of the recipes even emulate popular restaurant dishes with healthier twists.

The app also features a conversion section for use while cooking in case caregivers find that they need to measure out pints but they only have a quart measuring cup. Along with the ability to favorite recipes for later use and a section with recipe videos, this app gives caregivers the tools needed to plan delicious meals without needing to spend hours searching for the perfect recipe. 

The SparkRecipes app is available for free for Apple and Android platforms.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko

In case you're wondering why you've been seeing pink everywhere for the past two weeks, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Early detection in breast cancer can mean the difference between surviving the disease or losing the battle. Two specific apps put out by the Keep A Breast Foundation and the National Breast Cancer Foundation focus on helping women learn how to perform self examinations properly and set reminders on a monthly basis to do so. 

Women of all ages should perform a monthly self examination of their breasts to check for lumps as well as attend regularly scheduled mammograms and doctor appointments. A large percentage of senior caregivers and their senior clients are women, so caregivers can use these apps to educate themselves and their senior clients on the detection signs for the disease. Both apps offer instructions on how to perform a self exam but differ in other features. Caregivers can look at the instructions in both and determine which best meets their individual needs.

The Keep a Breast Foundation app offers detailed cartoon diagrams to show visually how to perform the exam. It also gives caregivers the opportunity to set a monthly reminder to perform their self examination. By checking monthly, women are more likely to recognize if something changes in the future so they can bring it up with a medical professional. 

The National Breast Cancer Foundation app offers descriptions of a few different ways to do the exam, so users can pick whichever they are most comfortable with. It also features a Breast Cancer Clinic finder using a caregiver's current location so that a caregiver may schedule an appointment if they need to. There is also an option to donate to the Foundation from within the app.

Both apps are free. The Keep a Breast App is available for Apple and Android platforms. The National Breast Cancer Foundation app is available for Apple platforms.

Senior caregivers, let us know your feedback on this app and keep us posted if you discover additional apps that assist with caregiving duties and help relieve caregiver stress. You may also refer-a-friend to a senior caregiving job and win prizes weekly and monthly on Caregiverlist. 

-Paige Krzysko