Bills, Bills, Bills.
I hate paying bills, and I especially hate overpaying on my bills. And that is where new personal finance apps like Trim, are coming in to help everyone get the most out of their finances.
How Does the Trim App Work?
Functioning with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Trim is a holistic financial assistance and management service.
The app allows you to achieve your financial goals through tailored recommendations and mega-saving opportunities each time you make an expenditure or payment.
Trim can negotiate bills, analyze your financial transactions, cancel those forgotten and unwanted subscriptions (hell yeah!) and provide personalized suggestions for the right financial accounts.
It can help you understand financial investment choices, make informed decisions, and, therefore, save you money!
Isn’t keeping track of your financial life hard? ‘Set it and forget it’ is the autopilot mode we’re all on when it comes to bills and payments. Imagine moving around in a smart car about ten years from now.
That car will automatically drive you to Walmart and the park while you relax with your feet up an
d catch up on the local news on your phone. Trim is like that smart car in your financial life. It automatically drives you to your financial destinations.
Why Do You Need to Trim?
Let’s look at why you need to get Trim into your life (it’s the best relationship gamble you’ll take) and how Trim works.
Reduces Everyday Bills
Negotiation of bills is the star attribute of this service. Trim will negotiate on your behalf with any internet or phone provider, lowering your bill up to 30%!
Trim covers all leading service providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner (Spectrum). For all other service providers, you can easily upload/email Trim your bill for negotiation.
Trim charges you only if it succeeds in saving money for you. Talk about efficiency!
Trim continuously monitors your bills and negotiates whenever and wherever it sees an opportunity.
Automatically Saves
Trim will aid you in achieving all your savings goals. It will help you choose a goal, set a time-bound target, and track your progress. Sit back and watch as your weekly money transfers double with a 1.5% growth rate. Who doesn’t want more money?
Pays Off Debt
Trim can help you be debt-free by providing a custom pay-off plan, helping you reduce the APR (annual percentage rate), i.e. the interest you pay for borrowing money, and access to expert financial advice.
Monitors Spending
Trim helps you track where your money goes by keeping tabs on all your transactions.
It helps you sort the spending categories wisely (travel, food, online) and enables you to track your transaction by searching for the merchant’s name, instead of sifting through the whole history.
Trim tracks all your recurring monthly/weekly charges and helps to weed out unwanted subscriptions.
Personalized Service
Trim will recommend the right credit card for you. For example, Trim might recommend a card to help your credit score or a card with rewards in a category that fits your spending habits.
Trim helps you set up alerts and reminders, which is an excellent tool for getting you to pay attention to what you’re doing with your money. For instance, you can set up a low balance alert, an overspend alert, or even a late fee alert.
All in all, Trim is great for successfully canceling those unwanted memberships, subscriptions, notoriously expensive contracts, and more.
And all with high-grade encryption in place. Trim keeps all of your information extremely secure. It’s as safe as any banking organization and uses a two-factor authentication or OAuth when you sign in.
Do You Need to Pay to Trim?
Signing up to Trim is free! Don’t believe it? Trim is very results-oriented and lets you use its services, which include:
- A personal finance dashboard
- Tracking month-to-date progress vs. last month
- See your cash flow trends
- Heat map view of daily spending
- Personalized alerts and reminders
- Overdraft detection
- and a lot more
Then how does it make money, you ask? Trim offers additional features:
- Trim charges you a fee for the negotiation of bills. It charges up to 25% of the first month’s savings.
- The Trim Concierge plan pairs you up with a professional financial coach who analyzes your accounts, provides accurate advice, answers all your questions, and aids in your financial goal achievement. All of this is not standardized in terms of fees, and you can pay a fair amount of $3 to $10 a month.
- Trim Simple Savings plan charges you $2 a month for the account in which there’s an interest rate of 1.5% paid by Trim, enabling your savings account to convert to a high-yielding one.
- Trim is also compensated by third-party partners such as credit card merchants, for customer referrals.
Company History
Started in 2015 by Thomas Smyth, an LSE and Yale graduate, who has multiple years of experience in investing in financial technology startups.
Trim’s mission is to transform consumers’ financial lives and make it very easy for them to achieve their personal financial goals.
Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is backed by venture capitalist investors. These investors include Ashton Kutcher (Co-founder of Sound Ventures), Eniac Ventures, Version One Ventures, and Core Innovation Capital.
Labled the largest and fastest-growing chatbot, it raised almost $2.2 M in seed funding. It was so successful that in the first seven months of its operation, Trim saved users more than $6 B just by canceling unwanted subscriptions.
Pros
- Takes Action on Your Behalf: Trim sets itself apart from traditional banking because it is a virtual assistant that takes action on the user’s behalf by coordinating with the service provider for subscription cancellations.
- Negotiates Bills: Gets you the best offer by saving money on your routine bills.
- Cancels Unwanted Subscriptions: You don’t have to worry anymore about the premium subscriptions or the diet app subscription you paid for ‘x’ months ago. Trim will cancel all recurring expenses that are going to waste.
- Easy to Use and Understand: The service is very straightforward and website based, with user-friendly navigation and less than a 3-minute sign up.
- Charges Are Fair: You’re charged only if you save money.
- Multiple Tools in One Platform: From your credit card bills to your grocery bills, daily expenses, service bills, and financial investments, it’s all in one place.
- Savings: Well, obviously! Saves you a ton of money.
Cons
- Limited Budgeting Capability: Not very intuitive when it comes to organizing spends, this app is not a full-fledged budgeting app.
- No Mobile App: While this may be a let down for many, Trim operates only through web presence. All its communication is via Facebook Messenger or SMS.
- Limited Merchants: Bill negotiation is currently only with cable and internet providers. Trim is yet to cover the vast services and payments market.
Ask Trim App Review Final Thoughts
Trim is a legit platform that can help you get any overspending in order.
While the service is hardly comprehensive, Trim is not a scam and can be used to make a big difference in your spending.
Leave a Reply