Best IFTTT Recipes for Savings and Money Management
If This Then That ( IFTTT ) is a useful tool for automating actions between your web applications, but it can also be useful for saving and managing your money. You can use it to find great deals or even help you split up your total costs. In this post, we’ve rounded up some of the best ways to use IFTTT with your finances and show you how to make them work.
If you are not familiar with IFTTT, we have a guide to the basics . However, this is not too difficult: you create a trigger channel, select a trigger, and then select the action you want to take when that trigger fires. It’s pretty simple, and even if you’re a beginner, you can follow some of these recipes.
Track the drop in prices for the items you want to buy
Price tracking sites like Camelcamelcamel and TrackIf will track online prices for you and notify you via email when they drop. However, you can do this and more with IFTTT.
Best Buy and Home Depot have their own IFTTT channels, so you can easily create a recipe to automatically receive emails when a particular item drops in price. For example, this recipe allows you to track MacBook price changes at Best Buy. Every time their price changes, IFTTT will automatically send you an email. And it’s not just email. You can customize recipes to send you text alerts or even phone calls.
Ebay also has its own IFTTT channel. And this recipe sends you an email when your saved search on eBay shows an item below a certain price threshold . Let’s say you want to buy a used KitchenAid mixer, for example, and don’t want to spend more than $ 100. You can customize your eBay search and IFTTT recipe accordingly, and you will receive an email notification the next time the mixer transfers that amount.
You can also get notified anytime a Craigslist search finds a new result . Maybe you are buying a used car on Craigslist . This recipe sets up an alert whenever the brand and model you are looking for is listed, which comes in handy when you buy a high-demand item.
Save your receipts
Maybe you need to track your business expenses, or maybe you just need to document everything you buy. Either way, IFTTT has many options for keeping all your digital receipts and logging your expenses.
For example, with this recipe, every time you take a snapshot of a receipt and save it to a specific album on your iPhone, IFTTT will automatically add the details to a Google spreadsheet. Use this recipe for Android.
For online purchases, this recipe will search your email for receipts from Amazon, Woot, or other online retailers and then automatically save them to Evernote. If you’re not using Evernote, you can customize the recipe and save it to Google Drive or Dropbox.
Track who owes you money and split costs
Let’s say you’re a freelancer who needs to track clients who owe you money. With this IFTTT recipe you can send an IFTTT text message with the customer’s name and amount and then tag them with #cash. IFTTT will automatically save the information as a text file to your Dropbox account.
With a little tweaking, you can also send this to a Google spreadsheet or Evernote notebook. Instead of assigning Dropbox as a trigger, you simply add Google Sheets or Evernote to the “Then” part of the recipe.
It’s also useful if you’ve lent a friend some money and want to keep track. The fiance and I use the credit card for joint expenses and then pay in full at the end of the month. It’s always a little annoying to remind him to pay half of it, so I created my own IFTTT recipe to automatically email him when Chase sends me a “Your bill is due” warning email.
It’s even better if you have Square Cash . There is no Square Cash IFTTT channel, but since you can send Square Cash payments by email , you can automatically send your friend, roommate, or spouse your half of any bill. For example, this recipe allows you to send recurring cash payments using Google Calendar and Gmail. So, for example, you can automatically receive half the rent .
Of course, if your bank offers automatic bill payment, you can take advantage of that too. However, this feature only works with dates, and with IFTTT you can initiate a payment for all kinds of different events. For example, suppose you have hired a tutor and have to pay her for each lesson. Set up a location-based alert that automatically triggers a Square Cash payment every time you visit her home or office.
Get free stuff
If you enjoy buying free apps, games, or music, IFTTT can help you.
Here’s an IFTTT recipe to notify you when popular apps on the App Store go from paid to free. Try this if you are an Android user.
And this recipe will alert you to free books. It links to your email and Reddit free e- book board. Likewise, here’s a recipe that warns you about free Steam games. You can also get notified about free Craigslist content in your area using this recipe.
Save money on electricity with smart devices
IFTTT really stands out when it comes to smart home devices. Just check out all these recipes that automatically tune the Nest thermostat . You can:
- Decrease the temperature on the thermostat when you leave a certain area
- Get notified if your thermostat reaches a certain temperature
- Turn off the thermostat whenever the sun goes down
Likewise, if you have a Hue light bulb , you can:
- Turn off the lights automatically when you leave the house
- Turn on the light when you wake up
- Turn on the lights at sunset
Do you have a WeMo switch ? There are so many possibilities with this too. For instance:
- Turn things on or off when you leave or come home
- Turn off the device after it has been used for a specified time.
- Turn off the party lights at the set time every night
By making the thermostat, power, and lighting in your home a little smarter, you only use energy when you need it, which means you save money on electricity.
Save money automatically with Qapital
Qapital is a banking app that saves money in your account every time you trigger certain events. For example, you can create a “rounding” rule in your application that rounds your transactions to the nearest dollar and places the change in your savings account. You can also connect your account to IFTTT for even more options.
For example, you can set up automatic transfers to your savings at any time:
Let’s say you want to try the spend-to-save rule and put twenty in your savings account every time you spend . You can link your email to IFTTT and get savings anytime you receive a receipt sent to your inbox.
IFTTT provides so many options that you can customize recipes to suit your unique money needs. If you are a fan of automating your finances , they will come in handy.