Start the year strong by making a few positive decisions about your personal finances. It doesn't take anywhere near the time and effort it used to take to revamp your savings plan or start an investment account. A big part of the reason it's so easy now is that mobile apps for personal finance have taken off. The more financial apps that enter the market, the more competitive they have to be. And for us regular folk, that means we get better apps that offer unique services and cater to a variety of needs.
Some common financial goals are to:
- save more (the ultimate reason is usually something like to pay off a loan or create a financial security net),
- set up some kind of credit monitoring (it's way less work than you might imagine),
- start investing for the first time (not at all scary, I promise),
- be better about paying bills on time (when you have the money for them at least), and
- stop paying for subscriptions that you don't use or need (it's money down the toilet).
Below are some suggestions for how to reach these goals using personal finance services and apps.
1. Turn Your Savings Plan Into a Game
If your goal is to save money, whether to pay off debt or for a special purchase, try Qapital. This mobile app for iPhone and Android gives you plenty of new ideas for how to sock away a little extra cash automatically, based on rules you create. For example, you could give yourself a monthly budget for your local coffee shop, and, if you spend less than the budget allows, the remainder will automatically be added to your savings account. You can also make rules that use other apps, such as rewarding your savings account with a dollar every time one of your tweets gets retweeted. Qapital is free to download and use, but it requires setting up a new FDIC-insured savings account via the app.
2. Get Alerted If Your Credit Is Compromised
Most us know that we should have some kind of credit-monitoring system in place, but how do you get one? WalletHub is a free service that keeps tabs on your credit report and alerts you of any suspicious changes. You can sign up and let WalletHub do its thing in the background, or you can drop by the website every so often to check your credit score and get tips on how to improve it.
3. Start Investing
It's easy to feel like you've never truly reached adulthood if you don't have a brokerage account for investments. The mobile app Stash Invest for iOS and Android, makes it easy to open one and get started. Minimum investments are just $5. It's not entirely free to use, but the fees are reasonable. For users with less than $5,000 invested, Stash Invest gives you the first three months free, and then your bank account (not your investment account) is charged $1 per month. Account holders with $5,000 or more invested pay 0.25 percent of their account balance per year. Hopefully, your investments earn enough to counter those fees.
4. Never Miss a Payment
Late fees are a sore financial subject because they are often avoidable. You can simplify your bills by consolidating them into one place, a new feature in the online financial app Mint. It's called Mint Bills, and it gives you a clear overview of all your bills alongside all your other account balances, so you know if you have the money to actually pay those bills on time. You can even schedule bill payment from within the app, both in advance and immediately. Many (but not all) bills can be paid with next-day speed.
If you have a Capital One account and an Amazon Echo, you can also pay bills the moment it crosses your mind, as long as your Echo is within range. Remember this phrase: "Alexa, Ask Capital One to pay my [credit card, home loan, auto loan] bill," and you're set. You can ask Alexa to check the status of various accounts and their balances, the next payment due date, and how much money you charged to a Capital One credit card at certain stores.
5. Cancel Your Subscriptions
A new app called Clarity Money for iPhone helps you cancel subscriptions that could be racking up huge annual or monthly charges. This app looks through transactions in your credit and debit cards (and other financial accounts) for subscription fees and recurring charges, such as gym memberships, music and video streaming services, annual credit card fees, and so forth. It then summarizes them to show you just how much you're spending. If there's anything you want to cancel, the app can do it for you.