• Home
• Checking Accounts – Everything You Need To Know

“Spending Time”:Texting With—Your Bank??? Well, Kinda

A number of online money management tools have grown in popularity over the last few months, but for most people, the benefits of this sort of tool aren’t yet clear. I’ve looked at a number of money management tools and used them myself in order to get a better picture of how I’m spending money, how often I’m spending it, and what I need to do to reach my financial goals. This post kicks off a series covering some of the great features offered by tools like Mint, Wesabe, and Quicken that can help you (well, both of us) get and stay ‘on the right track.’

Both Mint and Quicken Online offer mobile alerts, and  for those of us who use text message for daily communication, these alerts make perfect sense. But even if you don’t text message frequently, think of the convenience of finding the following alerts in your pocket:

Daily Balance
While you can receive reports about your balance everyday of the week, I’ve chosen to receive texts just every Friday. This way, I start my weekend knowing exactly how much money I have available to me. Mint does a great job of this—not only do I get a text containing the balance of all my accounts (checking, savings, and credit card), but they also send the alerts right around 6:30pm—the normal time I switch from “work” mode to “weekend” mode. Whether I’m already out with friends or just getting out of my office chair, right then and there I can plan how much money I’ll spend over the weekend. It’s painless, quick, and extremely helpful.

Large Purchases
You can receive alerts when any of your accounts receives a large charge. Because my only large payments are for my student loans, I set my alerts for “any purchase larger than $60.” This helps me two ways. First, if I am charged for more than $60, I probably didn’t make that purchase, so I can quickly call my bank and report an erroneous charge or, worse, someone else using my account (which, fortunately, hasn’t happened). Second, because my student loan payments are higher than $60, I’ll know when the transfer has taken place. As an extra benefit, if I go out and charge more than $60 on any of my cards, I get a nice reminder to keep my plastic in my pocket for the rest of the night.

Bill Alerts
With Mint, you can schedule text alerts for credit card bills, and with Quicken, you can schedule alerts for any bills. These are great help, especially for those of us who are just learning to pay bills regularly. In Mint, you can choose to receive reminders from 1 day to 2 weeks in advance (in Quicken, you set reminders for any number of days before the bill).  I’ve found that I’m quicker to ‘get on the ball’ with my payments if I receive alerts 4 days in advance, but even if you schedule automatic bill payments, these texts are great reminders for when your account balance drops.

These tools offer other text alerts for when you go over your weekly budget, when the balance on any of your accounts drops too low, or if there are an unusually high amount of purchases in any category (ex: you could receive a text if you’ve spent more than $60 eating out in a week). You can even text Quicken to get your balance any time of the day and Mint will send alerts if your financial institution (bank or credit union) charges anything to your account or if the interest rate on your credit card or savings account changes. And, of course, all of these alerts can be scheduled as emails, too.

Whether or not you text regularly, these sorts of alerts can serve as little reminders to stay on top of your finances (they certainly do for me). Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst at a banking research firm says it well:

“Money is really, really important to us, but we really, really don’t like managing it.”

While it did take me about 15 minutes to get my account and text alerts set up in each of these programs, knowing if my card is charged a lot, receiving reminders for paying my bills, and starting my weekend off confident that I won’t overdraft are huge benefits that are entirely worth it. Whether you’re financially sitting pretty or just scraping by, these alerts will keep you in the know about your accounts and minimize the amount of work you need to put into managing your budget. If you sign up for text alerts through these or any other online money management tool and they help you out, let us know!

Here are a couple screenshots:

From Mint:

And from Quicken Online:

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.