In Focus

My budget is a hot mess.

I haven’t had a car payment in years, and of course, now I do, which is basically eating into all of my fun money. So, it was time to sit down and reconfigure my bills and my budget.

I tend to list my bills on a piece of paper, to keep track of what needs to be paid, and when. This has been my go-to for years. Now that my budget is a bit tighter, I started scribbling out what bills to pay per week, as I am paid weekly. Let’s just say it’s tighter than I’d like.

Looking at ideas to shuffle things around, figure out how much I have left after bills, and other necessities like gas and groceries were becoming too much to process. So I figured, there has to be an app for this. And of course, there is.

I came across one with good ratings that does something I haven’t seen before. It will negotiate some bills and try to get a lower rate! Sold.

For a few bucks a month, this app is sorting all my bills, spending habits, even my income. Sure I was nervous to put in my bank information but seeing how this is laid out was totally worth it. It even came across fees I didn’t see in my bank statements.

It is currently “negotiating” my cell phone and internet bills, saying they have an 85 percent success rate. The catch is they will ask for a one-time fee, a percentage of the first-year savings. And you get to choose the percentage. So, naturally, I went with the lowest, not knowing how this will turn out, of a whopping 30 percent. I’m down to try it. So what if I have to pay a one-time fee to save money in the long run? I see it like paying for Amazon Prime. It’s cheaper to pay for the year subscription than it is monthly.

The spending graph is something else. It automatically categorizes many transactions from deposits, car payments, groceries and so much more. It’s so nice to see it put in a perspective my brain can understand. It also came up with a pet category for paying a vet bill. It even put the bills’ due dates on a calendar. There were a couple of bills I had to manually add but this was a lot less work!

This app is amazing...except for the part where it figured out how broke I am. Sigh. Well, hopefully, I will save some funds in the long run.