Perhaps you’ve seen the recent disturbing advice from the Royal Bank of Scotland to sell as many investments as possible ahead of their predicted cataclysmic stock market crash. Or perhaps you’d rather ignore that advice altogether and make saving a higher priority. We’re not in the business of offering financial advice ourselves, but if you are interested in taking a closer look at your finances and doing more in the way of savings, we do have some recommended tools for you.
Mint
Mint is free and it’s been the gold standard of budgeting tools for several years. It’s very easy to set up and integrate with all your accounts, even your 401ks, IRAs, Paypal, and Bitcoin. Each section is organized to show the big picture of your finances in an intuitive way. For example, the Overview section shows your account totals, monthly budget, credit score, spending broken down by category. Alerts show where you went over budget. Obviously, this doesn’t work as well for cash transactions as it does for credit and debit card purchases—you have to manually enter what the cash was used for.
Parts we love:
- Free credit score
- Ease of setup
- Alerts show when you exceed the budget you’ve set
- Ability to add your own budget categories
- App available for iOS, Android, and web
Parts we don’t love:
- Recording cash purchases
- Advertisements selling financial products
- Having all financial information in one place is convenient, but also poses some risks—guard your login details carefully!
Acorns
Acorns is an app that lets you save automatically and fairly painlessly by rounding up your transactions and depositing those savings into an investment portfolio diversified with six index ETFs. These ETFs trade like stocks and represent broad holdings of stocks or bonds. You are able to change the investments to be riskier or more conservative to suit your personal preferences.
Acorn is ideal for people who are younger than 24 and students of any age (you’ll need to register with a .edu email address)—for that demographic, management fees are waived. For investors over age 24, Acorn claims that its management fees are comparatively low: “Using Acorns for a year can cost less than some traditional brokers charge for two trades.”
However… if you have 50 transactions every month with an average of $.25 rounded-up per transaction, you’re only investing $12.50 every month. In that case, 8% of your monthly contributions are going to Acorns’ monthly fees. If you made 100 transactions per month (with that same $.25 roundup per transaction), you’re investing $25 per month and giving 4% to Acorns. Read more about the ways such fees could be disadvantageous here.
After you install the free Acorns app, all you’ll need to start investing is your online banking login information (which generates the roundups), and your checking account and routing number (where your money is pulled from).
Parts we love:
- The automated approach makes it more likely that you’ll save.
- It’s great for people under 24 and students, who won’t incur any management fees.
Parts we don’t love:
- The management fees are not ideal for users over 24 or non-students.
BillGuard
BillGuard has a bit of overlap with Mint, in that it’s meant to help you understand your spending habits, but it’s one of the best tools out there to protect your cards from unauthorized transactions. First the app synchronizes your bank accounts, then it brings up your total balance and the amount you spent during the current month. Like Mint, it’s also free.
If you’re at all familiar with Tinder, you’ll recognize the swiping activity that lets you confirm your transactions. Your inbox shows all your transactions at a glance; swipe right if you made the transaction and left if you don’t. If you don’t recognize the transaction, you’ll have these options: help me recogize this, report/contact merchant, and follow-up later.
Parts we love:
- BillGuard helps you avoid “gray charges”—unwanted hits on your credit card from services you signed up for and forgot about, or where you were mislead about recurring charges
Parts we don’t love:
- Its interface is not quite as functionally robust as Mint’s.
Though we don’t dispense financial advice, we certainly do offer advice about technology. Contact us any time or leave us a comment below!
