3 Banking Tips That Can Save You Thousands Over the Rest of Your Life
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Here are three key banking tips that will save you thousands over the rest of your life.
In the long run, automatic bill pay has the potential to save you more money than nearly any other banking feature because bills on autopilot are bills that never go unpaid.
According to Chase, a single missed payment can tank your score by more than 100 points and haunt your credit report for up to seven years — and payment history accounts for 35% of your credit score, the largest percentage of any factor. When you need to borrow, a hit like that could limit you to only the most expensive loans with difficult terms — if you're even approved at all. That could cost you thousands on an auto loan and tens or even hundreds of thousands on a mortgage while potentially precluding you from rental leases and employment opportunities.
Nacha, formerly the National Automated Clearinghouse Association, operates the Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network, which is responsible for electronically transferring much of America's financial data and funds.
It suggests taking advantage of direct deposit splits, a valuable tool used by fewer than one in four of the 88% of employees who get paid through electronic transfers. By sending portions of each paycheck to different accounts directly from their company's payroll department, workers can divert a set percentage or dollar amount straight to savings every pay period.
Nacha reports that employees who split their direct deposits save $90 more per month than those who do not. That's $1,080 extra every year.
Writing for Ramsey Solutions, personal finance coach and author Jade Warshaw stated that the average person finds $395 during the first month of budgeting and cuts their long-term spending by 9%. Naturally, she recommends Ramsey's EveryDollar budgeting platform, but your bank's free app might be the most powerful arrow in your financial quiver.
Nearly all major banks and many smaller ones offer valuable budgeting tools that could help you save thousands of extra dollars over the years, including:
Spending trackers
Expense categorization
Cash flow trackers
Real-time updates and alerts
Goal setting and progress tracking
Visualized insights
Spending limit setting controls
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 3 Banking Tips That Can Save You Thousands Over the Rest of Your Life
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Fast Company
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Yahoo
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The Newest Stock in the S&P 500 Has Soared 510% Since Its 2015 IPO, and It's a Buy Right Now, According to Wall Street was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNN
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‘Revenge dress for a party in Sicily': This platform is using AI to make online shopping hyper-personal
As anyone who's scoured the internet for a bridesmaid dress knows, online shopping can be a pain. Among almost unlimited options, it can be a difficult task to find just the right style, color, size and price point. A tech startup called Daydream is now looking to fix that by letting users search for a product online in the same way they'd describe it to a friend. A user could say they're looking for a 'revenge dress to wear to a party in Sicily in July,' for example, or 'a summer bag to carry to work and to cocktails after.' Daydream, which has staff in the New York and San Francisco areas, is just the latest tech company using artificial intelligence to try to make online shopping simpler and more personalized. The demand is already there — a survey of 5,000 American consumers published by Adobe Analytics showed that 39% of respondents had used a generative AI tool for online shopping last year and that 53% planned to do so this year. 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Users can then continue chatting, just like they would with a chatbot, to refine the search; for instance, by asking for more casual or less expensive options. As users spend more time on the platform, it will start to tailor recommendations based on what they've searched for, clicked on and saved. When they're ready to buy, shoppers are directed to the brand's website to complete their purchase, and Daydream will take a cut of the sale. Unlike many of the other big players in e-commerce, Bornstein is eschewing ads-based rankings — she wants products to show up on recommendation pages because they're a likely fit for the customer, not because brands have paid for them to be there. 'As soon as Amazon started doing paid sponsorships, I'm like, 'How can I find what the real good product is?'' she said. 'We want this to be a thing where we get paid when we show the customer the right thing.' On a recent CNN test of Daydream, a search for 'white, fitted button-up shirt for the office with no pockets' led to a $145 cotton long-sleeve from Theory that fit the bill. But the recommendations aren't always perfect — a search for 'mother of the bride dress for a summer wedding in California' returned, among more formal styles, several slinky slip dresses, including in white, that seemed more suited to a bachelorette party. Bornstein said the company continues to refine its AI models and collect user feedback. 'We want data on what people are doing so we can focus and learn where we do well and where we don't,' she said. Part of that work, she added, is training the AI model to understand what it means when users say, for example, they're looking for a dress for a trip to Greece in August (it's going to be hot) or that it's for a black-tie wedding (it should be formal). Daydream launched its web version to the public last month, although it remains in beta testing, and plans to release an app this fall. In the future, Bornstein said she expects people to use AI not just for shopping but for a range of fashion needs, such as pairing items they're shopping for with existing pieces in their closet. 'This was one of my earliest ideas, but I didn't know the term (generative AI) and I didn't know a large language model was going to be the unlock,' she said.
