I suck with my money. Here’s what I’m going to do about it.
I am a stereotypical yuppie. I work for a startup in London, attend yoga classes every Tuesday and eat a low-carb diet (oh, and blog apparently now). But another trait I have which seems to also be common among my fellow yuppies is that I suck with my money. Like, really suck.
I am firmly in the 34% of young people who are scared to check their bank balance, and routinely hit the end of the month deep in my overdraft. And this is due to nothing but my own financial incompetence. I work in an awesome job which pays me well, yet I seem completely incapable of not overspending every single month.
2019 is the year this changes.
Every tube station seems to be chock full of adverts for finance apps, challenger banks and new ways to help people like me save, all with the promise of making banking and saving faster, easier and much less scary. I like the sound of less scary.
My (very rough) plan
My plan has three steps. Firstly, to control my spending through gaining greater insight into where and how I am spending my money. For this I want to explore moving my current account to one of the challenger banks, who all provide detailed breakdowns of where and with who my money has disappeared to. It will make for grim reading, and confirm I am addicted to uber, but it needs to happen.
After I have my spending under control I want to start saving. Here again there are a number of apps to help, including Moneybox, and Cleo and new banks like dozens that claim to make saving fun. I like the sound of that.
Once (or if) I’ve started saving, I want to explore investing. This is a relatively new area for the FinTech world, but apps like Freetrade, Glint and others are leading the charge to make investing open to everyone.
Starting with spending
I currently bank with FirstDirect, which is an offshoot of HSBC setup a few years back to embrace the online banking world. Despite having amazing customer service and a pretty stress free experience, I just don’t like it. The app is average at best, and in the name of security they seem to rely on an incredibly complex set of codes that you have to generate every time you want to do something. Like four different sets of codes. Madness.
It also does nothing more than provide me with a list of my transactions, and allow me to send money the old fashioned way, so I’ve been using an app called Yolt to gain some insight into my spending. I may do a full article on Yolt another day, but in short it plugs into all your accounts (and credit cards) to give a single view of all your accounts. It’s been good, but manually categorising all your transactions every week gets real tiresome, as well as having to refresh my bank details in the app every 30 days.
So instead I want to try using one of the new challenger banks, like Monzo, Starling or Revolut, who categorise and predict your spending automatically, at source. But before I move my account over, I am going to take each for a test drive, one week at a time.
The Great British Bank Off
Over the next five weeks, I am going to use a different challenger bank for a week at a time, transferring cash in at the beginning of the week, and writing about my experience at the end. Whilst a week isn’t a huge amount of time, and probably won’t give me a huge amount of information, I really just want to get a feel for how the app breaks down my spending, gives me useful insight, and ultimately helps me recognise areas where I can reduce spending. The idea of my phone confirming that I spend too much in Waitrose every month terrifies me, but hopefully it will give me a kick of motivation to start doing something different.
Once I have tried them all, whichever I like the most, I will move my current account over to, and shut down my First Direct account, and start looking at other cool apps.
It’s quite exciting really.
Why I am writing this blog
I decided to write this as a blog, and not just keep this as my own weird little experiment, partly as a challenge, but also because I want to help other people like me who feel completely hopeless around their finances. It’s a real shit feeling getting to the end of the month and having absolutely no money, especially at the age of 23, and if I can change that this year, and help someone else along the way, that would make me pretty damn happy.
So thats it. I want to help other yuppies like me, who hate checking their bank accounts and stress about their finances, one app at a time.
