How Can Technology Help Improve Your Finances?

Technology has profoundly changed nearly every aspect of our lives, particularly personal finance.

14:52 06 January 2020

From apps that save money for you to apps that let you monitor your investments in real-time to apps that send you personal alerts when you go a little overboard with your spending, technology has completely redefined the way we all look at personal finance. With the right technology, managing finances don’t seem to be cumbersome and intimidating anymore.

Here are four simple ways in which technology can help you manage finances and increase your wealth.

Becoming debt-free

Reports say that young people who are still paying off their student loan debt, consider deferring key milestones in life such as starting a family and buying a home. Huge debt brings with it the onus to repay all monthly installments in time, so eventually, we are led to thinking about changing our lifestyle just to stay afloat.

Even though becoming debt-free is not as easy as you might think, with the right tools and guidance and a bit of positivity, you will be well on your way to a debt-free life. There are certain apps that give you a high-level view of how much you owe, along with sensible tips and techniques on how to repay chunks of your debt and become financially free faster.

As well as giving you an actual game plan that works, it lets you track your payments and measure your progress so you can know how you’re getting on with chipping away at your debt. And, that is invaluable.

Budgeting

Leading personal finance apps comes with a bundle of features that let users make a budget, track their bills and many other things that basically allows you to take control over your finances. There are too many apps on the market, but for the sake of this discussion let’s take Mint for example. Developed by Intuit, this free personal finance app comes loaded with a lot of smart features, but most users find its budgeting functionality to be the most effective. 

Let’s briefly look at how it works. First off, you need to link your financial accounts (bank, credit cards, etc) to the app. After linking, the app pulls relevant information from the linked accounts to work out a comprehensive budget based on your income, spending patterns, etc. The budget is split into multiple categories like Food, Entertainment, and Shopping as they relate to your spending, making it easy for you to figure out where your money goes. And, the best part is that the app has some advanced algorithms to compute potential savings for a month, so you’ll know how much you can save by cutting down on your spending in one or more of these categories.

If the interest rates offered by banks don’t interest you, then you can consider putting your money elsewhere. A lot of sports aficionados all over the world have started turning to offshore gambling websites, and that is the main reason why the people behind https://judisakti.org made it possible for players to place their bets on the outcome of these games. Partnering with industry-leading brands and bookmakers, this website offer some of the best odds you’ll find online and makes sports betting much more enjoyable and rewarding than other sites. Create an account, make a deposit and give yourself the best chance to hit the jackpot.

Maybe you’re not comfortable sharing your financial accounts data with an app like that. There are apps that let you opt for manual syncing with your bank account offline, but generally, they are renowned for protecting user data through high-level encryption. Overall, these apps are a blessing to those who have a poor relationship with money. From letting you monitor your budget on the go to being a one-stop solution for all your financial woes, it is safe to say that these apps are built to turn you into a better money manager.

Saving

Using the right technology also allows us to get smart when it comes to saving money. Several apps have gamified the whole process of saving money, making it seem much more fun than it actually is. For instance, apps like Qapital ask you to link your financial account to get started. After that, you need to set a goal and add details like how much money you’d like to be able to save, etc.

We all have different goals; some of us want to save money for a vacation abroad and some of us want to create a pool of savings to buy our dream cars. Whatever the goal, add it and enter the amount you’d like to save. These apps then let you pick and choose the rules for saving. Even though, some app sets it by default to “round to the nearest dollar”, you can make other choices as well.

Let’s see what happens if you go with the default option. Whenever you use your card to buy something, the app rounds it off to the nearest dollar and adds the unbilled remaining cents to your savings account so you’re actually saving money without knowing it. Assume you make a purchase for $7.73, Qapital will take $0.27 from your bank card and put it into your savings pool. All these tiny savings start to add up over time. Other than the default rule, these apps also have a few more sets of rules through which you’ll be able to save as much if not more.

Investing

Investingis a key component of personal finance that often gets forgotten. Over the years, the investment landscape has changed drastically- and with it, the technology on which the markets function and the technology facing the investors. What was considered unachievable or simply overwhelming in the investment circles a few years ago is now possible with the latest technology. For instance, apps like Acorns put into a low-risk exchange-traded fund scheme all the money (spare change) from your daily spends, completely shifting the paradigm revolving around the world of investment. If you don’t know much about where and how to invest or are just taking baby steps to invest for your future, tools like Acorns might be just perfect for you. Just link your bank account to the app, set some rules and forget it. These apps will do the heavy lifting for you.

Summing up, it’s kind of hard to emphasize the impact that technology has on personal finance. Modern day apps have pretty much covered all the bases when it comes to keeping your personal finance sorted. With technology getting better and better, these apps will become much more intuitive to use and help you manage your finances better than you think you could.