Money Crashers: 10 Best Paycheck Advance Apps to Help You Make It to Payday

A few years back, I wrote about the dangers of payday loans and the less-awful alternatives you can use to get out of a financial jam. One alternative I mentioned was a payroll advance: asking your employer to give you a portion of your next paycheck early. This isn't the same as a loan, since you're just being paid for work you've already done. It's just a way to get access to the money before your official payday. I also noted in that piece that if your employer wouldn't give you a payroll advance, you could use an app called ActiveHours to do the same thing.

Fast-forward four years, and ActiveHours — now known as Earnin — is only one of several apps you can use to get access to your pay sooner. Some of these work like an advance, while others just eliminate the delay between the time your employer submits your paycheck to the bank and the time it shows up up your account. And many also provide other features like online banking and investing, cash-back shopping, and tools for employers to manage their work forces.

Note that this piece suffers from the same problem as my earlier one on browser extensions: the boss asked me to add a section to it, then moved that section to the top without telling me. This time, they actually did think to try and rewrite the text to reflect this, but in a way that doesn't make sense. The original article listed Earnin first, saying that it was "the first payroll advance app" because it predated all the others; they moved it down to third and described it as "the next payroll advance app." Just giving you a heads-up so you won't be confused by this meaningless statement.

 

10 Best Paycheck Advance Apps to Help You Make It to Payday