Money management is an essential skill for improving and maintaining a good financial life. It covers everything from how you budget to how you handle investments. Without it, you can lose all your hard-earned money and get yourself into debt. No matter your financial situation and goal, you should know where and how you’re spending your money.
But if you’re like many people, just keeping within your budget and covering daily expenses are already hard enough. It’s even more so when you factor in saving and investing. Note that the inability to manage finances can bury even the highest-paid employees in debt. In the end, it’s always about how you make daily financial decisions.
Below we’ll discuss several banking features that can help you better manage and spend your money.
Email and Text Alerts
Being aware of your finances is the first step to better money management. By knowing where you stand financially, you can make more informed decisions. Fortunately, banks now have an alert system that allows you to track your spending in real-time. These alerts are deliverable through email or text.
You can set up alerts for low balances to ensure you have sufficient funds in your account. All you need to do is decide on the specific threshold. When your balance goes below the set amount, you’ll receive an email or text alert. This way, you can stay on top of your day-to-day financial issues, goals, and transactions.
Besides low balance alerts, setting up alerts for deposits, upcoming bills, credit cards, and loan accounts is also possible. With these email and text alerts, you can also spare yourself from making transactions that would send your account into overdraft and incur extra fees.
Digital Budgeting Tool
A solid budget is an essential ingredient for maintaining financial health. You can now do it more confidently and efficiently with digital budgeting tools. Although they were only accessible through third-party apps, many banks these days offer a practical and built-in budgeting tool in their online banking.
Whether for utilities, groceries, or entertainment, you can do low income budgeting for each category in a few steps. Note that these budgeting tools also come with spending trends that help you identify where you’re constantly over or under budget. By just tagging your transactions, you can better see where and how you spend your money.
Automated Savings Tool
Saving money is an important financial goal. But most often, it’s easy to get off track when you’re not consistent in saving a portion of every paycheck. The good news is, you can now automate your savings with online banking. When your paycheck comes in, you can automatically transfer specific amounts of money to your savings account.
One way to do this is to schedule your transfers on the same day you get your paycheck. This way, you can ensure that you don’t overdraw your account with your automatic savings deposits.
Some banks also have a feature that rounds up an amount and sends the spare change into your savings account. You’d be surprised to see how a spare change from every purchase can add up over time. With an automated savings tool, it’ll be more manageable to increase your savings without feeling burdened.
Automatic Bill Payment
Missing payment due dates can result in costly late fees. But with automatic bill payment, you can ensure to pay them on time. Remember that consistent and prompt payments to vendors or lenders help improve your credit score. With good credit, you can get better rates and terms if you need financial help in the future.
In addition, many banks also send reminders for your bills that will remind you to sign in and pay. It’ll also help you check if you have sufficient funds to cover recurring and non-recurring bills. With automatic bill payment, you can decide when and how much you’ll pay them. There’s also an option for one-time or recurring payments.
Subscription Management
Managing subscriptions for various services can be daunting. But banks now offer a subscription management feature that allows you to keep up with several platforms, whether it’s for streaming videos or bargain shopping.
With this feature, you can have more control over your subscriptions. You can automatically or manually set it up any time you want. You’d be able to track your total spending also. If you think you’re spending more than you ought to, you can cancel unnecessary subscriptions or those you don’t use anymore.
Overall, this gives you a single place to handle all your subscriptions without having to manage each one of them manually.
Conclusion
It’ll take some time and discipline to master the skill of money management. But these bank features can help you do it with more ease and confidence. With bank automation and personalization, you can make better financial choices, from budgeting and paying bills to monitoring your spending and savings.