Most of us waste a lot of time on our smartphones, and while they’ve become undoubtedly an invaluable way of staying in contact with the important people in our lives throughout the pandemic, they’re a huge time-sink that often saps productivity.
Want to put your phone to good use throughout 2021, and for something a little more productive than just scrolling social media or playing games? For those that want to come out of lockdown restrictions with a better financial standing, here are some quick tips on how to save and invest money efficiently using your smartphone.
Understanding and visualising your spending
The smartphone in your pocket is an incredibly powerful computer, able of pulling up pretty much anything you want to know in an instant. If you haven’t already, why not use that power to help you get a better understanding of your existing financial status; both your current spending habits and also your savings profile?
Again, you’ll have probably already done this, but start by downloading your account’s corresponding online banking app, as this will allow you to check your balance in a pinch, send and receive money on the go, and even cancel ongoing direct debits. From there, you might decide to look into one of the many different financial advisor apps, such as the informal AI Cleo. This application in particular takes a look at your spending habits and gives you recommendations/reminders throughout the day in a fun, social message format. For a list of other interesting savings/investment apps, take a look at the blog piece put together by The Big Investment.
Getting started with savings
Once you’ve come to understand your finances a bit better, you can then start using the range of different smartphone savings apps at your disposal, helping you to trim the fat of your money-wasting habits, and start focusing on building a financial buffer that you can then put to good use when you come out of lockdown.
Plum, for example, allows you to categorise and coordinate your spending, showing you how much money that you can comfortably spend as disposable income once your immediate commitments are done and dusted. Moneybox is another good example of a platform that rounds up the loose change of day to day purchases that you make, putting them into savings pots or even small, low-risk investment portfolios on your behalf.
Investing the money that you’ve saved
If you’ve accrued a decent amount of savings/capital, you might then decide that you want to put that money back into work for yourself, formulating a financial portfolio and investment strategy for your future. Of course, if you haven’t already guessed, this can be done easily through your smartphone, too. You can quickly start playing small games with low-risk that teach you about the stock market, then moving onto smaller, low-risk investments in order to test the waters.
Smaller investments aren’t the only things that you can start getting involved with from the comfort of your front room through your mobile. If you want to look at something a bit more advanced and long-term, even property investment is a real you can get into at the tap of a button. Companies such as the award-winning RWinvest and El
Did you know? – Again, looking at property investment specifically, mobile phones are even being used throughout the pandemic as makeshift VR devices, allowing potential landlords, tenants and investors to get an in-depth look at a given area in a first-person perspective. This technological development was already in effect to aid international investors that don’t have the ability to reach a given investment site far away from them, and it’s been extremely helpful over the past twelve months while lockdown restrictions have been in place.
