I use my gizmos for all sorts of stuff, but anything to do with money and technology in the same sentence has always made me a little uncomfortable. It’s been a long journey that took me several years, but it’s finally at the point where I can do most of my financial heavy lifting from my iPhone or my Mac without hesitation. There are a few developmental steps that I had to progress through before I was ready for this though.
The first was trusting the system. I had a very common distrust of doing finances on my computer, like all it would take is just a foolish click or typing in the wrong number and horrible things would happen, or I would get hacked. My belief at the time was that if I didn’t do my banking on my machine then I wouldn’t be capable of being a victim. When I talked with my bank about my fears they let me know that there are protections against some mishaps and greatly eased my fears. They did make it very clear that I should protect my account numbers and login information with the same level of caution I would guard my Social Security number with. Most banks require a really good password (really tricky to even make one that meets their requirements the first few times- this many uppercase, that many lowercase, oh so many characters, some symbols, some numbers, and maybe even more, like punctuation). Having long and complicated passwords is a pain, but it’s important and necessary. Another thing that many banks have embraced is two-step verification, where you need a password, as well as a secondary verification method. Most implementations of this send your phone a text message, or opt to have a robot call you and give you the secret code that’s always changing. This greatly enhances security; my thoughts are that it’s a pain to me when I know my password and have my phone, if someone malicious is trying to guess my password and succeeds, they’ll also need my phone for that second part of the two-step verification.
I almost always have my iPhone with me and one of the most useful money management apps I’ve used thus far is Mint. What I found attractive about this app is that I can put in multiple accounts and credit cards and see how much money has come in, what’s gone out and where it’s gone. Mint has all sorts of neat and useful features, like pretty graphs. There’s a lot of tweaking you can do, like any purchases I make at gas stations are generally automatically set to fuel, but I can re-categorize the purchase to snacks or whatever might be more appropriate. I can even make a note about a specific purchase. Mint was the first finance app I was really comfortable having on my phone because they made a point that it’s just for viewing my purchases, and I can’t actually move money around.
Many credit cards offer alerts for purchases. I have it set that when charges of a certain nature happen on a credit card I get an email or text message. If I have my phone with me, I generally get notified before I walk out the door of wherever I made the purchase. There are a couple of other apps that are companions to a physical debit card I carry. One is the Simple app. I get push notifications directly from this app. Google Wallet does this as well. It’s really impressive how fast these notifications come through.
My bank and credit cards all have their own apps as well. I remember getting hit with like a three dollar “mobile banking fee” for moving some money around in my bank’s app, I’m sure it was in black in white somewhere in that large block of text that I just tapped “I agree” to so that I could start using the app. On the plus side, I have no recollection of ever being billed for just checking my transactions or balance from any app or using a service like Mint.
I enjoy online banking for it’s convenience and the mobile apps are a potentially useful extension that has definitely made my life easier.