Three Ways Technology Can Boost Your Finances
Raise your hand if you feel like you’ve got enough money already. Is it fair to guess that nobody reading this has their hand up? Now, raise your hand if you feel like you could have enough money if you just made 5% more? 10%? How much more would it take to make you feel financially secure and stable? There’s only so much that we can do to get a raise at work outside of just blowing by our coworkers or asking for a raise outright. However, there are three ways technology can boost your finances, and I’ll explain them right now.
As a short disclaimer, you should be sure that you do a little investigation on your own of these points. Nothing is foolproof, but these ideas could certainly be a heck of a lot worse and maybe they’ll drum up a couple of other ideas, too.
Using Technology to Boost Your Savings
This first point is one that I’ve made over and over, and for those who have read Ramit Sethi’s outstanding book I Will Teach You to Be Rich, you will no doubt recognize this: it’s automation. I sound like a parrot telling people about this pointer, but it’s great advice that I’m happy to repeat. I just need to give credit where it’s due, because it isn’t my idea.
Automation is perhaps the biggest benefit to any sort of technological advancement. Automation gives us cars at affordable prices, allows us to browse the internet at speeds so fast that you never would have believed it during the dial up days, and it allows us to put our savings plans on autopilot.
If you are with a bank that has an online service of some sort, this is likely to be very easy. Log into your account, and then just schedule the savings plan and put it on a monthly schedule or whatever other time frame you are comfortable with and that fits your overall financial plan.
This process takes all of maybe ten minutes, and it completely takes the thinking out of having to pull money out of your checking account each payday, and depositing it into your savings account. It’s not very exciting to implement a savings plan, but it’s necessary and automatic it helps to ensure you will stay on track.
Technology Can Root Out Improper Charges On Your Bank Cards
This is a simple point to make. Being able to log into your account from a smart phone app, or on your computer, can turn up incorrect charges that you may not have noticed until the end of the month when your bank card statement was sent out. Even worse, how many of us have gotten a statement, and even though we know that we should read it thoroughly, and ended up skimming it and missing charges or not being able to identify them?
With the advent of the internet and online banking, we can log in ever day if we want to and check our statement right then and there. If your bank is really proactive, they may even have a fraud protection department that works to spot improper charges. This can save you a tremendous amount of anxiety and help to keep your finances and credit in check.
How much easier is it to spot a suspicious charge on your credit or debit cards if you can log in and check your expenses on a day by day basis? It can be easy to go a little crazy doing this, but if you have some concerns, you can put them to rest quickly, or address the problems immediately thanks to having access to online banking.
You Can Use Technology to Make More Money
Maybe it’s the hustle and bustle of every day life that so many people get caught up in today, or maybe it’s just an issue of mentality, but hardly anyone has a second job anymore. I’m not talking about long term, career types of jobs, but jobs where you go in and you work a day or two each week to make an extra couple hundred dollars each month. Between our commutes, playing Angry Birds on our smart phones, making sure we watch The Voice or whatever show we just can’t miss each week or family obligations, not many people are working side jobs anymore.
The good news is that you can make use of the internet to make extra money, in a family friendly way, of course. There are quite a few tasks that you can perform online for people who are willing to may a few dollars or more. These are things like online freelance writing, or writing at Mechanical Turk to make a little bit of money in just an hour or two a day. Or less. Take a moment to Google each of those to see what I’m talking about.
There are a ton of other ways to make a buck online as well. Before, we had to commute all over the place to get from one job to another, but now many people can make a little extra cash online in between browsing on their Facebook pages and reading emails.
If you made an extra five dollars a day, you would make about one-hundred and fifty dollars per month, right? That adds up to, give or take, eighteen hundred dollars per year. Would your life be a little easier if you had an extra eighteen hundred dollars per year? The short term income seems light, and it is, but over the long term, that kind of money can make a fair bit of difference.
And there you have it. Three ways that living in the current age of technology may help you to boost your personal finances. What are the ways that you have made use of technology to make your financial life easier? Or have you? If not, could you?
I’m Derek and I do most of the research and the writing at thedebtonator.org, where we seek to act as a hub of relevant information from around the web and provide commentary for what are hopefully useful article resources. For more, feel free to drop by and take a look at the article of the day.