Young Scrappy Money Podcast Ep. 030: Five Financial Apps/Tools I’m Really Digging

The financial world is full of apps, tools, and resources at your fingertips… but it can be hard to figure out where to start. In this episode, I dig into five of my favorite resources for banking, debt, budgeting, investing, and life insurance.

Resources from this episode:

• Young + Scrappy, home to Michelle’s work as a financial advisor and financial coach
• Capital One, Michelle’s preferred personal bank of choice. It’s great for it’s low fees, decent interest rates, solid mobile app, and multiple savings account functionality.
• The Vertex42 debt reduction calculator, my favorite free debt analysis tool. Though you should also check out the rest of the Vertex42 website–so many great spreadsheets and templates for free!
• PocketSmith, the relatively new budgeting app that doesn’t just show your current snapshot, but also allows you to project out your account balance over time. It does take some setup, but is neat once you crack the code.
• Betterment.com. the robo-advisor that allows you to input some information about your goals, deposit money, and then get personalized (algorithmic) investment advice and portfolio recommendations to help you reach those goals
• Policygenius, which helps you sort through and compare multiple quotes for insurance. I used them for life insurance, and they made the process super easy for me!
• Jesse G, my editor. If you ever need audio/video editing work, give him all your love and money

Full transcript:

INTRO: [00:00:00] Hello. And welcome to the Young Scrappy Money podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Waymire. And each week, I’ll be bringing you tips and tricks to help you take control of your finances as well as interviews with people who made big financial changes in their own lives. So join us. And we’ll help you get your financial s**t together. 

MICHELLE: Hello, everybody. And welcome, welcome to another episode of the Young Scrappy Money podcast. Today, we are talking resources. We are talking some of my favorite resources for managing different parts of your money— apps, spreadsheets, websites, you name it. I am coming at you with a few of the things that I have been really digging on, things that I have tried recently, things that I’ve been recommending to clients recently, just resources that I recommend you check out as you are getting your financial s**t together.

I wanna kind of break these up into a couple of different buckets. I’m not gonna overwhelm you with resources. But I’ve got five different categories of apps that I think are really, really important. And I’m gonna tell you my recent favorite out of each of those categories as well as a short list of other ones that you can look up. 

If you’re listening, if you’re driving in your car, if you’re at work doing whatever it is that you do during the day that requires a little bit of podcast company, just a reminder that you can find all of these resources on our website at youngandscrappy.com/blog. Everything I mention in this episode is going to be in my show notes. There’s gonna be a full transcript for you. So I’m gonna go through some of these favorite resources. But just know that you can always find them online at youngandscrappy.com/blog. 

Before I dive into these resources, I wanna give you an important caveat. I do have personal experience with a lot of these. But I am not a representative for them. I am not a spokesperson for them. I don’t typically get paid to recommend them. There’s no affiliate links involved.

So these are things that I genuinely feel are neat resources that might help you. So take that with a grain of salt. Know that these are great for my personal situation. They might not be perfect for yours. But I’m not getting paid to recommend them. 

So I mentioned I have a couple of different categories that I’m covering today. I wanna talk about banking, debt, budgeting, investing, and life insurance. Those are the categories that have been on my mind recently and things that I think that I’ve found pretty decent resources for, things that I think you’ll enjoy. 

Let’s start with banking. Choosing a bank can be one of the biggest decisions people make. And yet we rarely give it any thought. When I was a kid, my first bank account was opened up with SunTrust bank. Um, it is long since closed. But I simply chose this because this is where my parents banked at the time. 

A lot of us are in this situation where we get a recommendation from a family member or a friend. Uh, I’ve also heard a lot of stories, people going and finding a bank on their college campus just because it’s the bank that’s there. And there is a person holding a sign outside of the bank. 

And so we kind of put ourselves in this situation where we choose a bank, and it might not be the right bank for us. But switching banks is so difficult, you wanna make sure that if you’re gonna do it, you better be d**n sure that it’s like a good bank that’s actually worth you taking all the time to open up your new accounts and switch over all your autopays. It’s a huge pain in the ass. 

So I switched banks recently. And one that I did a lot of research on, one that I really enjoyed using, is Capital One. So that’s my first financial resource that I’m digging, um, for banking. And that is Capital One. 

A couple of things that I think are super neat about Capital One, first of all, it’s an online bank. So this means there are no physical branches. Um, I wanna say there’s maybe like a couple across the country. There are a handful of ATMs. But at least where I live in Atlanta, Georgia, there’s actually not a Capital One branch within a few hundred miles of me. 

So this means that all of my banking, I do it either online through the Capital One website or through their mobile app. I like Capital One because when it comes to managing your finances, I just feel like there are some things that I don’t wanna pay a fee for. And banking is one of them. I don’t need a fancy bank. I don’t need to be able to deposit cash in person. And so Capital One has been a great resource.

A couple of other things that I’ll give Capital One a shoutout for. So, um, first of all, you can have more than one checking account without any fees associated with it. So I’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast that I’m a really big fan of giving yourself a weekly allowance, putting it on a separate debit card, giving yourself a separate checking account so that your money is very clearly delineated without having to track anything. 

[00:05:06] Capital One makes that super easy because you get, um— uh, Capital One makes that super easy because you can have your two checking accounts, no problem. I think they even allow you to have more than that. But I don’t know what the cap is. 

Um, they have the same open-ended policy, or I guess liberal policy, with savings accounts. So you could have actually up to 60, I believe— 60 different savings accounts, all separate, all clearly labeled with your goals. So if you’re really looking for a bank that lets you customize your accounts and label them, that has a decent mobile app, no fees, and pretty good interest rates— I mean, the interest rates aren’t the best that are out there. 

Uh, but if you have a good chunk of change in your— in your money market account, the rates are pretty— pretty comparable. Um, but capitalone.com, that is my financial resource that I’m really digging on recently for banking. They have been coming through for me.

The second financial resource that I’m digging falls in the debt category. And that is, of course, our lord and savior, the Vertex42 debt reduction calculator. Y’all, I sing this one’s praises a lot. But that’s because it’s wonderful. And it’s the best thing. 

And when I show it to people, their eyes light up because they’re so excited to actually have a concrete roadmap to paying down their debt with fairly minimal effort. So Vertex42 is this neat little website. Their tagline is, I think, “excel at everything” or “your guide to excelling at everything.” 

And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the nerdiest tagline because all they do is offer Excel templates and downloadable Google docs, um, things that are gonna help you get all of your life into a spreadsheet. They have a ton of free resources on there, just an absolute wealth of information on checklists, and calculators, mortgage, compound interest, um, weddings, budgets, like savings goals. You name it, these folks have some sort of Excel guide or calculator for it. 

But in my humble opinion, the shining star of Vertex42 is their debt reduction calculator, which is just the best thing. Basically, you download the free template. Um, you’re not allowed to resell it or use it with other people. Uh, but for personal use, it’s completely free to download and access.

You enter in your lender, the interest rate, the minimum payments, the outstanding balance of all of your debts. Get that information in one place. And then the debt reduction calculator has this dropdown box where you can actually choose what strategy you want to apply to it. 

And that way, you can kind of toggle back and forth, see all of your different payback options. And this bad boy is gonna calculate for you how much interest you pay over the life of all of your debts, when everything will be paid off by— if the date at the top is right. Make sure to change that date at the top. 

And then there’s a whole separate tab called payment schedule. And it lays out, month by month, depending on what system you choose, depending on how much extra you’re putting towards your debt every month— it’s gonna map out for you every single month until all your debt is gone what payments you should be making on each debt. So this stuff is super powerful. It’s unbelievably good, the freest, most beautiful debt reduction calculator I have ever found. So that is my— my pick for the financial resource that I’m digging in the debt category. 

I also mentioned that budgeting was on this list. And if you’ve heard me talk about budgeting, you know that I’m typically not a huge fan of apps. I don’t use Mint. I’m just not a big fan of kind of the old-school ones that allow you to track everything. I’m not a big fan of saving receipts. Like that stuff just isn’t really my cup of tea. 

I am a little bit new school when it comes to budgeting. Because I think in general you should make your spreadsheet, and figure out where your money should go, and then set up your bank accounts to help support that system. But there is a budgeting app that I have been surprisingly into recently. 

This is something that a client actually recommended to me, came to me and said, hey, have you heard of this thing? And I was like, no, I haven’t. So I went and downloaded it. It is called PocketSmith, so Pocket like the pockets in your pants, Smith like the last name, PocketSmith, all one word. 

And it’s new. It’s really interesting. It’s kind of unlike any budgeting app that I’ve ever seen before. So there’s a free version that makes you manually enter stuff. There’s a pretty inexpensive paid version that has the typical Mint infrastructure where you put in all of your different accounts. 

[00:10:03] And it pulls your data in. And it pulls all your transactions in. That stuff is totally fine. But there are a couple of things about PocketSmith that I think are really interesting and actually kind of innovative in the budgeting space, things that I haven’t necessarily seen before in an app. 

The first is that it allows you to project your account balance over time. So typically, when we think of budgeting, we sort of track— um, if you are tracking stuff over time, you might get a sense of how much money is theoretically left. Or, you’re giving every dollar a job, and so you’re zeroing out your budget. 

But what PocketSmith does is it says, based on what we know about your spending and your ongoing bills, this is how much surplus is in your account. Here’s how that stacks up over time. And they actually have a version— there’s three tiers. So the free one, I don’t know if it has this functionality. 

Um, the low-grade tier will let you map stuff out six months in advance. So this is really good for people who have a lot of those tricky items where every year something autorenews— Amazon Prime or other subscriptions. For me, it’s that CFA Institute. Every year, they’re wanting my membership dues. 

So if you have a lot of weird items like that, it can be really hard to plan for those and really hard to figure out how much money you need to have. So PocketSmith is neat because it actually shows you what your account balance will be like over time as those things hit. The highest tier of paid service actually shows you your projected account balance over 20 years, which is wild to me. Because so many of us don’t think of the impact that our savings can have in the short term, much less in the long term. 

So if you’re really in a place where you’re— you’re trying to grow your wealth and save up money, PocketSmith is a really good tool, a really good motivator. Because you can see how your money will grow over 20 years, which is just— again, that’s wild to me. I’ve not seen that kind of functionality in any app. And I think it’s super neat. 

One other thing that I liked about PocketSmith that I think is kind of fun is that they have a calendar in there. Many of us might use Google Calendars or an old-fashioned paper calendar, something that kind of keeps track of when our bills are hitting. This looks a lot more like a Google Calendar. So for me, just from an interface standpoint, I find it pretty easy to use. It’s a lot easier to use than, um, ye olde pen and paper, as it were. 

And this I think also flows into some of that account balance projection stuff. Because, by knowing the timing of our bills, we can figure out how much money would theoretically be in our account at any given time. So this is just a budgeting app that I think is really neat. Because it goes above and beyond the stereotypical, yes, we’re pulling in all your transactions, and we’re putting them into buckets for you. 

I feel like the long-term money management tools that are kind of embedded in this program are just really, really neat and unlike anything that I’ve seen from a budgeting app before. So PocketSmith, good job. Keep it up, if you’re listening. Welcome to the sweet financial app stage. Um, I— I’m excited to share that one with y’all, um, in terms of a budgeting financial resource that I’m digging. 

MID-ROLL ADVERTISEMENT:  Hey, friends. Michelle here. And I’ve got a little present for you. It’s called Unf**k Your Finances. And it’s a PDF guide filled with some of my favorite tips for paying down debt, controlling your spending, planning for goals, and more. Go to youngandscrappy.com/tips to download your free copy today. 

MICHELLE: The fourth category I mentioned is investing. Y’all, there are investing apps out the ass. It is so hard to filter these. It is hard to figure out which ones will work for you. When it comes to choosing providers, you’ve got all of your old-school, Charles Schwab, Vanguard types.

You’ve got your new-school trading apps, your Robinhood and your Qoins and all of that stuff. Um, but one type of investing app that I think is really neat for— we’ll call it like the casual investor. So this is not somebody who is necessarily looking to work with a financial advisor, if you want a little bit more hands-on opportunity than that. But it’s probably also not for the person who really wants to DIY it completely, if you’re not looking to build all of your own portfolios from scratch. 

There’s a whole set of investment resources called robo-advisors. Exactly what it sounds like, it has a lot of the functionality you would expect from a financial advisor. But it’s delivered in an automated robotic platform. So there’s a bunch of robo-advisors out there. I’m not gonna get too far into them. 

But I do wanna recommend one that I think is really neat in terms of its usability. Uh, and this is Betterment. So Betterment is spelled like better, like, oh, yeah, we’re better than you— uh, which, to be fair, I think they’re one of the better robo-advisor apps out there, in my humble opinion. And then ment, M-E-N-T, so Betterment, all one word. 

[00:15:08] And Betterment is a robo-advisor that is interesting because, at least in my personal opinion, I think a lot of investing apps can be really cluttered. So like if you have an old-school investing app, or even if you are on your— like if you have a 401(k) through your work, and there’s some sort of login or client portal, I feel like a lot of those websites are just legitimately hard to use. It’s not necessarily easy to find information on there. 

You never really know what you’re looking at. And I think, you know, those types of programs want to be super helpful. And so they show you all of this information that you need to make an informed decision. The downside to that approach is that it can be really cluttered. The apps are hard to use. 

And Betterment, I would say, is one of the best exceptions to this rule. So Betterment is stupid easy to use. Um, you can go to betterment.com, and then that is where you can open an account. So basically, you open your accounts online, the same way you would with an online bank actually.

It’s a pretty quick process. I’ve found that it takes people anywhere from like maybe five to 10 minutes to get their account open. But basically what it does is it asks you a series of questions about your situation and says, well, um, we know that you’re opening this type of account.

What are you saving the money for? Is this just general investing? Is this a rainy day fund? Is this for retirement? Are you already retired, and you’re looking to get income on an ongoing basis? Are you saving for a big purchase or the down payment on a house? 

When do you need the money by? So is this something that’s happening in three years, five years, 10 years, whatever? Um, you enter in the number of years you have to go until this goal takes place. 

You can optionally set a target amount. So for example, if you’re saving for a down payment on a home in five years, you could say, we’re looking to put in, you know, $20,000 or whatever your number is. And what the system will do is it will take your information about what your goals are and when you need the money, and it’s actually gonna go ahead and recommend a portfolio that works for you. 

So this kind of goes above and beyond a typical investment service just because normally when you get your accounts open with someplace like Schwab or Vanguard, you open your accounts. You deposit your money. And then you, as the investor, have to go in and make the decisions. You actually have to go in and buy and sell securities, stocks, mutual funds. Whatever it is that you’re buying, you have to make those investment decisions and act on them. 

With robo-advisors like Betterment, they handle all that stuff on the back end. So you get your account opened up. And you tell them about your goals. And then the system generates a recommended portfolio for you. When you deposit money, that money is automatically invested in that portfolio. 

A couple of other cool features that I like about Betterment, for some goals— let’s say again we’re talking about retirement. If you’re young, and you have 30 years till retirement, you can generally afford to have a pretty aggressive portfolio. Um, what Betterment will do is, as you get closer to your goal, it will actually dial back the risk you’re taking over time. 

So it’s not just like, we’re recommending this portfolio at a snapshot in time. A lot of times, the portfolio will change over time as you get closer to your goal so that even like on an ongoing management standpoint, it’s— it’s just stupid easy to use. Um, it’s pretty easy to hook up your bank. It’s pretty easy to find information.  

I feel like their, um, portfolio holdings page is pretty neatly organized. It’s got a really nice little pie chart in there about what you’re invested in. And if you click on any of the investments, there’s a dropdown box that pops up that says, here’s why we chose this investment for you. And here’s what these words mean. And here’s where you can find out more information about it. 

So I feel like they do a really nice job of presenting a sleek and easy-to-use interface, but with the option to dig in and really get a lot more information about that portfolio if that knowledge is something that you want. Obviously, like not everybody’s gonna get in there and read everything. You certainly don’t have to in order to make the system work for you. Um, but the information is there when you need it, which is kind of nice. 

I also really like Betterment because they do a lot of work on behavioral finance. So like the— the love child of psychology and finance is called behavioral finance, um, really about kind of understanding your behavioral biases, how we’re thinking about our money, what types of mistakes we’re likely to make in a world where we don’t always have time or energy to make the perfect decision every time. They have an entire team dedicated to behavioral finance.

[00:19:58] And so when they built the website, and when they built the app, one thing that I think is really neat is they tried to structure it with human psychology in mind. And they tried to put in some like various nudges and reminders, things that people tend to forget when they’re managing their own portfolios, like, hey, be a long-term investor. Don’t sell out at inopportune times. 

They have some friendly little reminders in there to, um, try and nudge you towards better decisions, which I think is really, really nice, especially for somebody who might not be super familiar with investing and needs a little bit of extra help to make sure that they’re having a good time with it. Um, Betterment also has an app. Uh, I’m trying to think about what else to say about it. 

I just really like Betterment. I think they have kind of a neat offering. And I think it’s a really cool resource for people who don’t feel ready for an advisor just yet but, uh, wanna take their investments, their savings, to the next level. So betterment.com, good stuff. 

The last resource that I want to talk about today is for life insurance. And I am talking about Policygenius. So Policygenius is basically a marketplace where all types of insurance policies are listed on there. It’s an easy-to-use interface where you answer a few questions about your situation and what type of insurance you’re looking for. 

Policygenius will pull comparable quotes from all sorts of providers and help you sort through them and figure out how to proceed. So part of it is delivered online through the Policygenius, um, like website. So for example, this summer, we bought our home. I needed life insurance for the first time. 

Policygenius is where I ended up going just because my life insurance needs weren’t super huge. I— I don’t feel like my situation was complicated enough that I really needed to talk to a professional. I wasn’t necessarily needing like a full-scale life insurance broker or anything like that. You know, we don’t have kids. I don’t have dependents. Um, none of that stuff applies to me. 

So I was looking for a pretty basic life insurance policy. And I had heard about Policygenius somewhere. It might have been just a website ad, honestly. Um, I’m not exactly sure where I found out about them. But I did some digging. 

And it turned out to be every bit as easy to use as they promise it is. So one thing that I thought was neat was I put in all the information about how much life insurance I wanted and what the term was. They had me answer a few basic questions about my health, so the usual like age, weight, “Are you a smoker?,” all of that like standard health information. 

Um, and then they gave me a couple of quotes. And then they asked for more in-depth information about my health, major illnesses that run in my family, um, that kind of thing. But what I thought was super neat is they kind of get at you a couple of different ways. So I was receiving confirmation emails. 

I was using the website. They actually had a couple of— like I had text updates set up. So as my policy was going through the process of getting approved or whatever, I was getting all kinds of sweet text updates. 

And then they actually assign you a representative to your case so that you have somebody who you can ask questions to who does not have a huge financial incentive to sell you a whole bunch of insurance that you don’t need. So one of the things I admittedly dislike about the life insurance industry— and maybe this goes for insurance in general— is that insurance providers typically get paid on commission. And so if you need a certain level of coverage, or you think you need a certain level of coverage, sometimes there can be a little bit of conflict of interest there. 

Your representative might have a financial incentive to sell you more insurance than you typically need. And it can be really hard to filter out when an insurance professional is kind of recommending a higher level of insurance just because they get paid versus, you know, maybe they just know more about insurance than you do. And they know more about your situation. And they kind of have a recommendation of how much you need. 

Anyway, I feel like working with Policygenius was nice because it kind of got around that issue. Like I knew how much insurance I needed. Um, they have some recommendations of how much insurance you might need, just depending on your situation. Whether you’re caring for dependents, whether you have a bunch of debt, all of those things kind of go in there. And then the representative that you talk to will kind of walk you through the decisionmaking process and figuring out which provider to choose. 

Um, one other thing that I really liked about this, I mentioned that it pulled comparable quotes for me. So once I put in my information, there were all kinds of quotes that popped up. There was actually a little message at the top that said, typically, we recommend going with the cheapest option. All of our insurance providers are vetted. We’re only showing you policies that we think are good or companies that we think are good to work with. So you have every incentive to just choose the cheapest policy and move on. 

[00:25:00] For me, because life insurance is actually a little bit out of my wheelhouse, as an advisor I don’t sell life insurance. Um, I try and know enough to be dangerous. But putting myself in the shoes of somebody who knows even less about life insurance than me, it was just a really nice process to go through. 

Because I felt like they gave me a lot of context for the decisions I was making, a lot of little nudges for, hey, you might need more insurance if this is the case, or, here’s a quick decisionmaking tool you can use. I just thought that was so, so refreshing. Because life insurance is opaque and scary. Um, a lot of us don’t understand how it works. 

It’s vitally important. But it doesn’t typically get a lot of attention from young people just because it can be so complex. And in a lot of cases, it can be hard to purchase. So, um, Policygenius was great. It helped me find a life insurance provider that I really liked. 

They helped me actually apply for that policy once I— um, once I went through the process of like filtering out which ones I wanted. So like that application was super easy. All of it was online. And then when I moved forward on getting that policy, the insurance provider actually sent a health professional to my house. 

Um, typically, when you get life insurance, you have to give a blood sample so they can check stuff like your cholesterol and all of that. They take your height and weight. Um, they actually take a urine sample, which is a little bit weird to do in your own house, but, you know, whatever. They kind of handled all of that process. So I didn’t even have to go and hang out in a doctor’s office forever, which was amazing. 

And then, when I got approved for that policy, they offered me additional coverage, totally optional. I feel like they did a good job of laying out all of my options for me to say, this provider has come back and said you can actually get more life insurance for this much more money. Um, I never felt pressured to make a decision. 

But when the process was done, I was just so grateful that I never had to sign any physical papers. I never had to leave the comfort of my own home to make this happen. I felt supported throughout the whole process. And I felt like there was a person who I could reach out to anytime I had questions about what was happening next. 

So props to Policygenius for taking something that could’ve been kind of stressful and difficult, um, and they made that a hell of a lot easier for me. So that was awesome. Life insurance, totally recommend you get it. Um, Policygenius, if you’re looking for a fairly easy way to compare a bunch of quotes at once, this is a financial resource that I’m totally digging. 

So that’s it, y’all. These are the resources that I have really been enjoying over the last couple of weeks: for banking, Capital One; for debt, the Vertex42 debt reduction calculator; for budgeting, PocketSmith; for investing, Betterment; and for life insurance, Policygenius. As a reminder, if you want links to any of these places, you can always find them in the show notes, which are located on my website at youngandscrappy.com/blog. 

We’ve got a full transcript there for you and a whole bunch of links so that if you’re looking for help in any of these areas, you can check out some of these financial resources for yourself. So that’s it for today. I hope you take a problem area in your financial life. I hope you find a sweet resource to help you. 

And then I hope you take that goal, and I think you should crush it right into the ground. So good luck with you. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, I hope you get that s**t done. 

END CREDITS: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Young Scrappy Money podcast. If you want to read about my work as a financial advisor and financial coach, you can do so at www.youngandscrappy.com. That’s www.youngandscrappy.com. Thanks again for listening.