Re:Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
by magicalhippo on Monday December 31, 2018 @09:15PM
(#18798491)
> Another thing I'd love to see, would be for banks to fundamentally reorient themselves to be their customer's advocates/financial guardians, instead of being yet another party encouraging people to borrow more than they ought to.
The largest bank in Norway has introduced some tools to help people make sense of their financial situation, and to help them save up money.
First and foremost is a budgeting tool, where they show you where money came from and where it went for each month. It has a lot of preset filters for labeling your transactions, and you can add your own. Top level view is "salary, rent, food" and similar, and then you can drill down a few levels. I found it gave a nice overview and allowed me to quickly pinpoint some small but frequent silly expenses I could cut down on.
They've also introduced a "saving game" of sorts, where you can set your own saving goal, like $2000 for summer vacation or whatever, and whenever you use your debit card they'll transfer a configured percentage of whatever you're purchasing into your savings account. So for example if I buy a coffee for $3, they add $0.3 to my savings account, deducting $3.3 from my main account. They've made some easy way to keep track of your goal etc.
They also added a special savings account where you get much higher rate than a regular savings account, with the twist that you can only deposit money into it using a monthly auto transfer (maybe also the above "game", can't recall).
The budget tool I found nice, the saving tools I don't really need, but I see how it could be helpful to some to make it easier to save.
Of course the above won't work miracles if the income simply won't cover required expenses...
The largest bank in Norway has introduced some tools to help people make sense of their financial situation, and to help them save up money.
First and foremost is a budgeting tool, where they show you where money came from and where it went for each month. It has a lot of preset filters for labeling your transactions, and you can add your own. Top level view is "salary, rent, food" and similar, and then you can drill down a few levels. I found it gave a nice overview and allowed me to quickly pinpoint some small but frequent silly expenses I could cut down on.
They've also introduced a "saving game" of sorts, where you can set your own saving goal, like $2000 for summer vacation or whatever, and whenever you use your debit card they'll transfer a configured percentage of whatever you're purchasing into your savings account. So for example if I buy a coffee for $3, they add $0.3 to my savings account, deducting $3.3 from my main account. They've made some easy way to keep track of your goal etc.
They also added a special savings account where you get much higher rate than a regular savings account, with the twist that you can only deposit money into it using a monthly auto transfer (maybe also the above "game", can't recall).
The budget tool I found nice, the saving tools I don't really need, but I see how it could be helpful to some to make it easier to save.
Of course the above won't work miracles if the income simply won't cover required expenses...