One area in which modern technology can bring us considerable benefits is our personal finances. In this article, let’s take a closer look at four selected apps of this kind which, in our opinion, may prove quite useful.
1. Bilo
Bilo is a simple and intuitive tool whose main task is to help us organize our household budget. More specifically, Bilo is used to pay bills automatically. All you need to do is register the app and then send your bills by email or scan them. The app itself will take care of paying the bills. Importantly, the tool is completely secure and uses only certified online payment platforms, such as Elavon and Przelewy24.
2. Listonic
The Listonic app is another smart tool that can make our lives significantly easier. This time, however, not only time but also money is at stake. What is Listonic? In short, it is an “intelligent shopping list.” The app offers many interesting features. For example, we can add products to the list by voice, which is particularly convenient. What’s more, Listonic automatically informs us about promotions on individual products and can even arrange the shopping list according to the order of the store aisles.
In practice, using Listonic can lead to significant savings. Why? While shopping, we become something like a robot that simply follows the instructions previously uploaded to the app. If we need to buy pasta, butter, ham and yogurt (the list can, of course, contain many more items), the app will direct us to the aisles containing precisely those products. This helps us avoid so-called compulsive buying—that is, putting unplanned products into the basket on impulse or simply because we happen to be in an aisle with, for example, sweets, even though nothing sweet appears on our shopping list.
3. Money Manager Expense Budget
This time, we are dealing with a somewhat more advanced tool. The main purpose of the Money Manager Expense & Budget app is to monitor and optimize the balance of our monthly expenses and income. The app’s basic function is to analyze and present our expenses and income in the form of charts. All we need to do is connect the app to our debit or credit cards, and we will be able to view, for example, a detailed chart of our expenses at any time.
In addition, the app offers other interesting and useful options, such as the ability to initiate a bank transfer or direct debit. We can also “connect” our insurance policies and deposits to the app, which will allow us to generate a comprehensive overview showing the state of our finances and how that state has changed over the past few months.
4. Instantor
The Instantor app is designed to verify our personal details quickly. Instantor is most often used during the process of applying for a loan from a lending institution. The advantages? Compared with the traditional method, namely a verification transfer, the Instantor app really works instantly. We also do not have to worry about whether the bank where we hold our current account is supported by the lending institution in “instant” mode, or whether posting the verification transfer could take as long as 24 or 48 hours.
Another common problem we can avoid by confirming our identity through the Instantor app is, of course, potential errors that may affect a verification transfer. One typo, for example in our surname or the transfer title, is often enough to significantly delay the verification of our identity by the lending company.
That is not yet the end of Instantor’s functions and advantages. The tool retrieves and sends the lender not only our personal details, but also our bank account history for the past 12 months. This latter function raises doubts among some customers, but in practice it proves extremely useful. Why? Before granting us a loan, every legally operating lending institution—not to be confused with a parabank—will want to verify our creditworthiness. Very often, lending companies offer two ways of carrying out such verification. We can submit an application on the condition that, if the lender makes such a request, we will provide documents confirming our income (this is a common provision in the regulations of lending institutions). The second option is to use the Instantor app. In purely theoretical terms, these two options are not mutually exclusive. In practice, however, if a potential lender obtains information about the state of our finances directly, as it were, by accessing our account history, the likelihood that the lending company will ask us to provide a complete set of documents is close to zero. This, of course, means a major saving of time, not to mention that we may earn income mainly from civil-law contracts, for example.