Automate Your Savings With IFTTT
If you’re trying to save money with a financial app, this tip from commenter Drew-Ferg11 will be very helpful:
Qapital doesn’t invest in stocks like Acorns (so it’s not a 1-1 comparison if you’re only looking for gains in stocks), but it rounds up purchases and saves them. It also allows you to jump to IFTTT and some other options to make saving a little more fun. For example, I save a dollar every time Trump tweets … as you can imagine, it adds up quickly.
Qapital is a great savings app because it’s so easy to gamify. You create a goal, and then it gives you several options for how it will save you, such as saving a percentage of every paycheck, or saving every time you buy what you’re trying not to buy.
And as Drew-Ferg11 pointed out, you can also link it to IFTTT. If T its T hen T hat is a site and an application that allows users to create logical operators (“if it happens, then it will”) pairing some Internet services and devices. There are tons of pre-built rules for Qapital, such as saving when the temperature rises above 75 degrees , every time you post to Instagram , when you add a track to a Spotify playlist , or when the International Space Station flies overhead . But you can also create your own unique rule.
And there are other ready-made finance-related applets to choose from on IFTTT. For example, you can receive an email if a certain stock is up 5%, or receive a push notification about the daily price of bitcoin.
In the Qapital app, I have set the payday rule and the guilty pleasure rule when I spend money at Madewell (what can I say, I love buttoning well). There are many programs and devices you can use to create rules in IFTTT – if you have any other creative ideas, leave them in the comments.