If you need help saving money, these 5 apps will make your life a lot easier. My name is Andres and this is the Find Your Freedom Show. Keep watching if you want to learn ways to start your path down financial independence.
If you’re like me, you find it hard to set money aside every month for a rainy day. I found a few apps that do it for you. I’m not sponsored by any of these apps. I only found the information and summarized it for you. The pros and cons were taken from other users that left reviews.
What a lot of these apps do is either round up your purchase and put the difference in an account or pull a scheduled amount of money out of one account and into another.
Granted, you can do this on your own, but if you’re like me…it’s not as easy as it sounds.
First up we have Acorn. Acorn is a robo investing app that rounds up your purchases and deposits them in an investing account. You can then choose from a portfolio of stocks and ETfs that Acorn has and invest your money. They have expanded to IRA’s and checking accounts and charge a monthly fee for each. These fees range from $1-$3. Accounts are free if you have a .edu email address and are enrolled in a 4 year college. People do complain about how small the portfolio of available investments are, but for the type of app that it is, the number of available items is ok. Another issue that I see is that this is an investing app and whatever you invest can rise and fall with the stock market. You must be aware of this when you start using the app. Below is a link to a full review by another website so you can get more details.
Second is Chime. This app is really a mobile bank. They offer a debit card and you can deposit your check from your employer directly into your account. The two ways Chime helps you save is first, it rounds up your purchases and puts the difference into your savings account. The second is an automatic deposit when you get paid (up to 10% of your paycheck). These are probably better for the person who isn’t comfortable investing yet. They also offer features that allow you to use your direct deposits earlier than the deposit date and you can borrow money from yourself before you get paid (a payday advance).
Quapital is an online bank that saves money using an external trigger. It still has the same round up feature but also allows you to save when you perform something like exercise. You set up goals you want to reach with your savings so you have something to shoot for. When you reach your goal you can either transfer your money back to your outside account or use a Quapital debit card to make your purchase.
Our fourth app is called Simple. This app is a little different because it allows you to set up your account to tell you how much is safe to spend after all your other obligations are met. You can set up scheduled monthly saving amounts that are set aside into another account. It also has budgeting tools and one cool feature I found was that it will allow you to set money aside from each check to pay each bill you have. It takes all these things into consideration when it gives you your allowed spending for the month.
Last on the list is Digit. Digit uses machine learning to learn what your habits are and saves accordingly. It takes a few weeks for Digit to learn you spending habits, but after that it saves small monetary increments when it feels it will be least disruptive. So if it knows that you have a lot of bills coming up, it might only save $5. If there’s a time when you have a little more free money, it will save a higher value (like $15). This is a good feature because you aren’t stuck with a monthly savings goal if your habits or expenses change. The app learns while you use your debit card and adjusts your saving amount accordingly.
This is in no way a full review. You should still do your own research because it’s your money that you’ll be using with these apps. I just wanted to give you a short summary of what is out there. If you’re more comfortable just using pencil and paper to budget and save, by all means do that. But the more options you have to help you reach your goal, the better.
Like always, if you have any questions I’ll be more than happy to give my opinion and look more stuff up for you guys. If you have an app that is helpful that’s not on the list, please let us know.
