New year, new way to manage your spending

I know that using the new year as a metaphor for a new beginning is a bit cliché, but there may not be a better time to start to get a handle on your finances. If you’re like most of us, you probably overspent during the holidays, so financial stress may be on the brain. That’s probably reason enough for you to at least think twice about spending, but it’s also a perfect time because the new year is the start of a new taxing period. It’s also the time when health insurance deductibles start over, so you might be spending more on doctors visits and other health-related situations at the start of the year.  All these things can lead to the need for having more day-to-day cash at hand.

FitFin can help you with that because we help you put your money into three buckets: Your take home pay after taxes, your fixed costs (mortgage, rent, etc.), and your variable spending (groceries, going out to eat, etc.). By identifying the first two, it helps you calculate your “allowance” so that you know what you can spend on your day-to-day variable expenses. FitFin also uses the 50/30/20 budgeting rule, and as you’re calculating your buckets of money, FitFin automatically checks your percentages against the 50/30/20 model. Quick refresher of 50/30/20: 50% of your take home pay should go towards fixed costs, 30% towards your variable spending, and 20% towards saving and/or paying down debt.

Once you set up your budget, you then simply start tracking your spending by manually creating expenses (which takes about 10 seconds) or by taking pictures of your receipts. FitFin breaks down your receipt data to not only tell you what you spent at the macro level (i.e. $100.00 at Walmart), but it also tracks what you spent at the individual item level so that if you ever need to cut back on spending, you can see exactly where your money goes! You can also compare prices for the things you buy at different stores!

And since you’ll now know what you spend for a box of Cap’n Crunch at Target, you can actually take that information to build a spend-predictive shopping list.  So, for example, if that box of cereal costs $3.99 at Target, you can put the item name and it’s price right into your shopping list, so that each item you put on your list has a price that will tally up an expected spend total. Then you can check that against your budget in real-time, before you even go to the store.  This is proactive budgeting!

Check out our How It Works page on our site for more detail. Now is a great time to give FitFin a try!

Do you know what you’re spending?

According to a recent study by the Center for Financial Services Innovation, almost half of Americans spend more than or equal to what they make each month. That leaves very little wiggle room for emergency savings, let alone long-term financial planning.

Do you know where you fall into this mix?  Many people don’t know because they don’t track their spending. CNBC estimates that only one in three people do this.

Spend tracking isn’t difficult.  All it takes is a little discipline and a few seconds.  Spend tracking with FitFin can be done in two ways: 1. By entering a manual expense, which takes about 10 seconds, and 2. By taking pictures of your receipts, which takes about 20-30 seconds. Entering manual expenses will allow you to track things at a macro level (i.e. I spent $153.80 at Walmart), while taking pictures of your receipts will allow you to track at both a macro and a micro level (i.e. I spent $153.80 at Walmart and $19.96 of it was on k-cups, $14.98 on a new basketball, etc.).

When tracking at the micro/product level, you’ll be able to see exactly where your money goes.  This comes in handy when you need to cut $150.00 from your monthly spending. You can simply go to your FitFin app and look at your Spend By Product report to determine where to make cuts.

To learn more about what FitFin can do, check out our “How It Works” page here.

Americans still aren’t budgeting

According to a 2017 study done by U.S. Bank, only 41% of Americans use a budget.  That means that almost 60% of us don’t have a spending plan. And for those 41% who do budget, I often wonder how much they actually review it.

FitFin’s budgeting feature is unique because your budget naturally becomes a part of your daily routine since it’s integrated into your shopping routine. You’ll see it several times a week because each time you use your shopping list or access your receipts, the first thing you’ll see is your budget.

FitFin also uses the 50/30/20 rule of budgeting, and it’s automatically built into the tool! What’s 50/30/20, you ask? There are different variations of the rule, and FitFin’s philosophy is that 50% of your take home pay (after taxes) should go towards your fixed costs (mortgage, rent, car payments, etc.), 30% towards your variable expenses (grocery, dining out, entertainment, etc.), and 20% towards savings and/or paying down debt.

New users to FitFin can set up their comprehensive budget in 5-10 minutes, and FitFin automatically calculates your percentages of fixed costs to your take home pay, then does the same for your variable expenses to give you an idea of how you stack up against the 50/30/20 rule.  This video shows you the process.

And remember that FitFin is a unique budgeting tool because it’s PROACTIVE. FitFin’s shopping lists actually predict what you’re going to spend and allow you to check that prediction against your budget in real time, before you shop.

Check us out at fitfin.com.  From here, you can learn more about how the app works, download our Android and iOS apps, watch our how-to videos, and much more!

Don’t throw away that receipt!

Okay, I admit it . . .  receipts are annoying. They clutter up our tables, fall onto the floors of our cars, and are generally a pain.  But think about all of the great information that’s on a receipt! Receipts can tell us when and where we shop, but with FitFin, they can also tell us EXACTLY what we buy.  Over time, that can give you a deeper level of insight into your spending. All this is done by simply snapping pictures of your receipts.  How easy is that?

FitFin has special technology that allows for receipts to be broken down to the product level so you know what you bought and how much it cost, which you can then track against your overall budget. But it does much more than just track the total amount spent.  It also helps you track how many times you purchase individual products, how much your aggregate spend is for those products over time, and it also lets you know where products are cheapest! Want to know if the coffee you’re buying at Walmart is really cheaper than Target? FitFin can help with that!

FitFin also stores receipts, so that you no longer have a George Constanza wallet or a desk that looks like Dunder Mifflin exploded on top of it. Once a digital image of a receipt is stored inside the FitFin app, you can easily retrieve it by store name, date, receipt amount, or even by a keyword on the receipt! So let’s say you always buy groceries at Walmart, but one time you bought a new smart TV.  You can tag that receipt so that if you need to find that one Walmart receipt with the TV purchase on it, it’s as simple as searching it by word.  And you have the power to rename the keyword so that if the smart TV you bought actually reads SMRTTV or something funky on a receipt (as is sometimes the case), you can call it whatever you want so it’s easy to find.  How cool is that?

And it’s all as simple as snapping a picture of your receipt! Check out this video that shows the process in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFcXeZLuaW4&t=42s

Download FitFin on Android or on  iOS.

Happy snapping!