Ready to automate your financial life?
In today’s episode, Kate & Owen are sharing over 10 tools that will help you streamline your life, by automating your savings goals, investing and financial admin!
| Tool | How does it help? |
| BPAY | I use BPAY to pay uni fees, super contributions, ATO bills & more! You can automate payments via BPAY to reduce your financial admin. |
| Automated pay splitting (e.g. Up Money) | Find a bank that lets you automatically split your pay cheque into different savings accounts as soon as it hits your account. |
| Round-ups (e.g. ING & Up Money) | Make the most of your spare change and boost those savings goals by turning on the savings round-up feature in your bank account. |
| Offset account | You can automate all your regular bills and mortgage repayments to come out of your offset account – reducing your financial admin each month! |
| Raiz Invest | Micro-investing apps like Raiz let you start investing on a regular basis with as little as $5, and they let you set up regular direct debits from your bank account. |
| Pearler* | Pearler is a newer player on the broker scene and actually allows you to automate your investment portfolio. |
| CommSec Pocket | This is a lite version of CommSec that lets you automate your investments into 7 different ETFs. |
| Sharesies | Another newer play in the broker scene, Sharesies lets you buy ASX, US and NZ shares and ETFs from as little as 1c – plus, you can automate this! |
| Robo-advisers (e.g. SixPark, Stockspot & InvestSMART*) | If building your own portfolio feels a bit overwhelming, robo-advisers put together ETF portfolios for you based on your risk profile, and invest your contributions on your behalf. |
| Sharesight | This is a great tool to keep track of all your investments in one spot, get tax reporting and make sure you don’t lose any of your dividends. Plus, it’s free for less than 10 holdings. |
| Xero | The ultimate tool for small business owners, Owen swears by Xero for holding his business together. |
*Please note, Pearler and InvestSMART are flat fee sponsors of The Australian Finance Podcast. We do not receive anything for mentioning them in this course.
💸 What Not To Automate
Some things like subscriptions shouldn’t be automated forever. It’s easy to forget about those in-app purchases that start hitting you up after a free 30-day trial, or renew without warning after a year (when you’ve long since deleted the app).
Here’s some of the areas worth considering:
- Don’t let annual subscriptions on discretionary purchases (like Audible, Disney+ or Masterclass) automatically renew each year. Give yourself an opportunity to decide if you still want to use these subscriptions on a yearly basis.
- Cancel your debit/credit cards every so often: suddenly you’ll hear from all those recurring subscriptions which happened in the background silently every year and every month, and be able to make an active decision whether to renew.
- Add calendar reminders to review your rates and bulky expenses, like insurances on an annual basis, to make sure you’re getting the best offer (loyalty doesn’t always pay in finance).
👀 Your turn: Think about one area of your finances where you might benefit from adding a little friction (like removing saved payment details from your browser history).
