By Kate O’Neal
With the New Year right around the corner, it’s time for people to start making their resolutions. As we all can attest, these resolutions are often times hard to keep. So many times we hear people say, “This is going to be the year I lose weight!” or “I’m going to live life to the fullest!” or “I’m going to spend less and save more money this year!” While I can’t do much for you on the first two, I can show you a way to stick with the latter resolution and help make saving money easy with the help of a simple app!
A couple months ago I was listening to my daily radio programming, “The Bert Show.” They were talking about this app that automates saving and I thought it sounded pretty neat. The app, Digit, which is available through both the AppStore and Google Play, automates saving money through texting. When I first looked in to it, I was a bit skeptical and hesitant, as it connects directly to your bank account. So I dug a bit deeper and found that Digit is FDIC insured and uses state-of-the-art security measures, including anonymizing, encrypting and securely storing your personal information.
Digit works by analyzing your bank account, including your income and spending. Depending on your situation, it will deduct anywhere from, on average, $5-$50 about two to three days a week. It will safely set your funds aside in a separate savings account that you can access anytime for no fees. If you’re concerned about Digit over drafting your account, they also have a safeguard against that through their no-overdraft guarantee.
Once you have Digit linked to your bank account, you manage your funds by sending text messages. I’ve listed some examples of the commands you can send below. You can tell it to save more, save less, don’t save once your primary bank account gets under a certain amount, withdraw, etc.
My biggest frustration with using Digit is that I don’t have the commands readily in front of me when I’d like to use them, as I haven’t yet committed them all to memory. Additionally, when I first signed up, I was getting a status update text every day. This got to be annoying, so I figured out how to set an update frequency command.
At first I was looking at my account everyday. Now that I’ve had an account for a few months, I check it every so often and it’s nice to see my balance keep increasing, and I don’t even miss it in my checking account. If your resolution is to save some more money, I highly recommend Digit.
Cheers to savings in the New Year!
Kate O’Neal
With multiple years’ experience working with clients in many industries, Kate brings her skills and positive attitude to Network 1’s team, clients and partners. She strives to provide the best service and solutions to her clients so they can achieve greatness through Worry-Free IT.
koneal@network1consulting.com or 404.997.7653
Network 1 Consulting is an 18-year-old IT Support company in Atlanta, GA. We become – or augment – the IT department for law firms and medical practices. Our IT experts can fix computers, but what our clients value most highly are the industry-specific best practices we bring to their firms. This is especially important with technology, along with its associated regulations and cyber threats, changing so rapidly. We take a proactive approach to helping our clients use technology to gain and keep their competitive advantage.
