How Technology is Helping in the World of Personal Finance

For most people, talking about their personal finances is a very uncomfortable conversation. Let’s face it. Even the most talented people make mistakes with their money. Sometimes we juggle bills in loo of delayed gratification. Impulse buying is the worst thing in the world to trip up a budget.

You would be hard-pressed to find a family without some sort of debt or credit card. Keeping up with all that can be stressful. Thanks to technological advances, however, our personal finances are becoming much easier to handle and keep track of.

Below are three ways tech is helping.

Buying a Home

Ever tried to buy a home? The process can be grueling and is very expensive. Most need a realtor to help them navigate through the process. Be that as it may, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made some updates to their process that will not only make it easier to buy a home but less expensive, as well.

Those enhancements will offer an “appraisal waiver, saving the customer the cost of the appraisal, automated borrower income verification, automated borrower asset verification, and the automated assessment of borrowers credit score.” Their new technical capabilities have already helped thousands to make their dream of homeownership a reality without dizzying them with all the red tape.

Self Employment

Going into business for yourself can be an adventure. It can also cost you a lot of lost revenue at tax time if you don’t keep up with your receipts and expenditures. Way back when, you had to make sure to write down everything, keep all your receipts in a secure place, and waste countless hours of time making calculations and checking them, often, more than twice.

An unbalanced ledger is such a pain. Be that as it was, today there are several names in software that will allow you to simply enter all that info and keep up with it for you. You can make and keep track of your own invoices, process credit cards, and even set up payroll if you choose to expand and you don’t have to buy the most popular one anymore.

There are free programs such as Wave, that will offer you everything you need for keeping track of your business records. They even offer apps for your phone so you can keep up with things on the go.

Online Banking

Think about all the interactions you have with your bank in any given week. You make deposits, withdrawals, order checks or a new debit card, and pay bills, at the very least. If you were to physically get up and into your car and drive back and forth to the bank every time you had an interaction can you imagine the time and money in gas that you would spend?

Technology to the rescue! Online banking allows us to do it all from the comfort of our home and most include apps we can use on our cell phones and bank from anywhere with internet access. With all the things that we have to get done in a day, online banking frees up so much extra time.

Our money is important to us and thanks to the evolution of technology, we can now take better care of it in a much easier way.