Elements CEO Reese Harper talks about the best finance app options to help boost savings.

<div class="block">Finance apps are a great tool to help save money, manage budgets and they can also help you invest. Reese Harper, CEO of Elements and certified financial planner, joined &#39;Stretching Your Dollar&#39; to talk about some of the best options on the market to help maximize bank accounts. </div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: Best Finance Apps to Boost Savings

Well, the show is all about helping you save. And so today, we're highlighting some of the best apps to keep you on top of your own personal finances from budgeting to paying the bills. There are more tools than ever to help you stretch your dollar every single day. So for more on the best personal finance apps, I'm joined by Harper Certified Financial Planner and CEO of Elements. Re Hi, what are the best? And thanks for having me on this morning. We're happy to have you give us the dirt. What are the best apps to help manage your daily finances? Man, this like changes almost every day. Um There's so many cool apps right now to help uh families, individuals and depending on your use case, I think we'll have something fun here for you to, to check out. Um I'd probably first say that the one I liked that got an editor's choice recently on the app Store is called Monarch uh Monarch Money. Um It's like an overall tracker uh that involves like um all of your personal financial balance sheet items like debts and assets, but it also tracks uh your transactions really Well, um I think is special about this group is it's a pretty talented uh startup. That's only a few years old that got a really big series, a financing and um uh as a fintech admirer, I always look for cap tables or the investors to kind of tell me if a design team have enough budget to make it all the way and this one's really well designed. So, ok, so monarch, monarch is definitely something people should check out. Can you list off just a few and then we can maybe break them down app by app. Let's do it. Ok. I would say the second one I'd look at was co-pilot. Um The next one I'd probably check out is Rocket Money. Uh Then I'd probably take out, check out acorns chime and I'd throw one more on their green light at the end. Those are the ones I'd probably check out right now. Ok. So for someone who is looking maybe for more of a unique approach among those apps, what would you say? And what are some of the special features about them? Yeah, if you're looking to like uh save money in a way that makes it really easy. Acorns is kind of special that way. Um You'd think that uh this concept would um have been um not so successful because basically all it does is just round up your spending transactions when you go to the grocery store and you'll see that you just start saving money over time. You can kind of pick how much you'd like to add to your savings account right after a transaction. And it's kind of crazy how much money piles up when you do that are really successful. Are most of these apps free? Uh, or do they require a subscription where you'd have to pay to use them? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. It used to be that almost all Fintech apps were free. Um And a lot of them still are. Um, but what you'll notice is a lot of consumers don't really want to be sold a lot of products in their Fintech experience. They want to kind of have an app that feels like a friend that's not just trying to come after them. So you'll see that uh sometimes these new apps have created subscriptions to allow them to, to, to be sustainable. There's been a lot of apps that haven't been able to make it. And so some of them are charging subscriptions to be able to mean their integrity and that's just a different business model that we've been seeing the last year. What about long term financial planning? Right. People who want to save for a house, they want to put money away in a 401k and an IRA to save for retirement. What are some good apps to help with that? Yeah. Um Right now if, if you look at uh the, the Rocket Money and the copilot recommendations I made earlier um and the monarch recommendations. So Monarch Copilot and Rocket Money all have investment integrations inside of their apps that are super detailed. Um what I probably say uh for, for most people that, that are looking to self direct or track this on their own. Those three have really good long term like uh visioning and forecasting in terms of like just investing apps like putting your money into something that you can buy stocks or bonds with or mutual funds and try to grow money for retirement. You're gonna be looking at categories like wealth front, better and Robin Hood. Um Those apps are kind of the place to like open an investment account and get started. The other ones I was talking about have a lot to do with like organizing yourself and seeing your picture in one place. Ok. Well, let's talk about banking services because that is certainly something that I know some apps do offer if you're a user and you want to access those banking services. Uh which apps would you recommend? I'm probably gonna lean to chime in, in terms of my recommendation there. Like um most apps don't actually have like a debit card and ATM access and banking systems behind them. Uh Chime has like a really robust network of ATM S. They have no minimums on their account openings. They have a $200 overdraft protection any advance money to their users ahead of their direct deposits. Um So it's a very banking centric uh platform that's almost 10 years old now as it started in San Francisco in 2013. I think it's a great, a great platform for banking, especially for uh people that are comfortable with um doing all of their banking digitally on their phone. All right, Reece Harper. So you have elements R. Thank you.