When you are in charge of your own money, you have enough money to save, invest, and meet your financial goals. Are you having challenges with this? Here is a site to help you with that, Trim. In this Trim review, you’ll learn how you can use this app for your financial plans.
The majority of Americans don’t make or follow a budget. At the most, they keep track of receipts and don’t have a way to organize their expenses.
Luckily, there are many budgeting tools you can rely on, making it possible to check all your accounts, loans, and expenses in one location.
You don’t have to worry about switching apps or making an endless spreadsheet to fit all your financial details.
One app that can be of great help to you is Trim. Trim helps you when it comes to paying your bills, canceling unused memberships, and paying off debt. Here’s what Trim exactly is, does, and can help you with.
What Is Trim?
Trim is a website that is made to help budget your money through your automated personal financial planner. Most people go to Trim because they can help you out in saving money. You can merge the Trim with SMS text messages or Facebook Messenger to communicate. By doing so, you can chat with someone about finances easily.
The chat with Trim is a huge help in organizing your finances and saving money in ways that you didn’t know were possible. Trim has a lot to offer, such as features like canceling unwanted subscriptions and bill negotiation, which we will go into later.
Aside from that, Trim launches new services from time to time. Currently, Trim has added their own FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) savings account.
How Does Trim Work?
Trim works like Mint. It is a financial tool that organizes your funds, investments, and accounts. With this, we no longer have to worry about budget, expenses, banking accounts, and more. You can just view your cash flow in seconds by opening Trim.
They also negotiate current bills you have, cancel any subscription you no longer need, and help to transfer to cheaper services. Trim saves their average user a total amount of $620. That’s not bad!
Trim has a lot of promising features such as Simple Savings, TrimPay, Debt calculator, and more.
Budgeting apps like Trim give suggestions on how to budget or how to manage our assets. However, the decision still is still with us and not with the app. That’s why Trim focuses on filling in the gap in the market.
They try to be as active as they can in categorizing your assets. They even went as far as using artificial intelligence so that you could achieve your financial goals.Â
To start with Trim, you have to sign up with Trim via the company’s site then link your accounts and credit card accounts.
What Does Trim Offer?
Having a budgeting tool is very convenient in assisting you when it comes to your finances. Trim provides many features that you will come to love, such as settling different issues regarding your finances. There are two types of features Trim offers, “Free” and “Premium.”
Although Trim is insanely famous for its bill negotiation tool, the other features are not that known. Let’s learn more about all of them and how they can help us strategically budget our money.
Trim Free Features
Trim is a free site and provides subscription cancellation services. It has been developed using algorithms and automation to save its users money anytime, anywhere. Here are the free features that Trim offers:
Canceling Services
The canceling service is the bread and butter service of Trim, where it helps you find and cancel charges or subscriptions that eat up your finances. It utilizes its algorithm to search for recurring charges and alert you of them. Trim sends you a list of your subscriptions through chat or text, and you can cancel them to save money instantly.
Debt Calculator
Their debt calculator allows you to see your overall debt in one place with the interest rates you’re paying. This calculator enables you to create a repayment plan and pay your debt faster.
Financial Dashboard
Trim’s financial dashboard is designed simply to ensure that you can view all of your accounts and expenses. This feature is limited to the accounts you added. However, it is still considered appealing and inspires you to look more into your funds.
Bill Reminders
With this feature, you don’t have to worry about paying your bills late, and you avoid the late payment fee. All you have to do is enter your information, and Trim will send you notifications of your due date and what to pay.
Savings Recommendation
There are many ways to save money, but it is more than just saving money with Trim. It will also help you increase your savings by changing services. For example, they recommend you switch to a different cable provider, another internet company that offers cheaper service, and more.
Spend Alerts
Trim will send you notifications when you have to overspend your money on a service and let you choose.
Trim Premium Features
We all know that free versions offer limited features. And there is always a premium account that costs $99 per year so you can maximize the services they provide. Let’s get to know all of them.
Bank Negotiation
This feature helps you negotiate your interest fee and other bank fees that you pay. Trim’s result is based on the shared information from your bank statements.
Automatic Credit Card Payments
Setting up automatic credit card payments is possible with the TrimPay feature. This is to help you pay your credit card bills and never miss a payment again.
Trim Simple Savings
Trim offers saving by setting up automated weekly transfers of your funding to the Trim savings account. The Trim savings account pays a 4% annual interest when you reach the $2,000 deposit threshold.
Credit Card Negotiation
Trim has automated bots that will negotiate your credit card fees and annual percentage rate (APR) on your behalf. How great is this?
Medical Bill Negotiations
Trim will be the one making the arrangement for your payment with a 0% annual percentage rate (APR) with your medical providers. They will also negotiate with the settlement for less than the total of your hospital bill.
Bill Negotiation
Among the negotiation features of Trim, this is the one that will surely help you save a lot of money.
Trim acts as your mediator between you and your bills, such as internet, cable, and phone bills that you get. They work together with companies like Verizon and Time Warner in order to save you money.
Initially, you will have to give Trim your billing statement or log in with your account through Trim, and then their services will calculate the optimal plan for you.
Trim searches for better payment settlement, available promotions, or talks directly with your billing customer service through chat. Premium members of the Trim have access to a financial coach and communicate via email.
So, if you have any questions, whether you need to ask for a bit of advice or other finance-related inquiries, you can send them to your financial coach.
How Does Trim Make Money?
With all the wonderful offers of Trim, how does Trim make money? Registering to Trim is free, and so are the Trim basic features. Let’s dig deeper into how they make money and what services you get to enjoy.
Trim makes money through the bill negotiation services, and it charges 33% of the total annual savings. In addition, just like the other budgeting tools, Trim also suggests particular financial products that may save you money. These are home, card, and credit card insurances as well as utility options like Arcadia Power.
Here are some of the free services that you can utilize in Trim:
- Text Alerts – You will receive notifications about subscriptions as well as significant purchases, and also your budget spending. These alerts are sent through SMS text messaging.
- Bill Cancellation – This service allows you to cancel any monthly subscriptions of your choice with only a simple text to follow and send to Trim.
- Budgeting Tools – With Trim’s spending analyzer and budgeting features, you can now monitor your finances monthly.
Is Trim Safe And Secure?
The question everyone wants to know before they sign up is if the service is safe and secure? You don’t want any of your personal information to get shared with anyone, especially the private financial data.
Trim is safe to use for you and your financial accounts. How so? Trim uses Plaid to collect banking credentials, and its services do not receive or keep your banking data.
Trim can acquire your transactions but only in read-only mode, and Trim could not in any way move your money or make changes to your accounts.
The Trim’s server uses both 256-bit SSL (secure socket layers) encryption and two-factor authentication, which you can switch on the settings. Whether you are signing in on your laptop, phone, or even with Facebook, the OAuth protocol is there to protect your data.
Lastly, the data collected by Trim is hosted on the online data storage on Amazon Web Services, the same service used by NASA, the Department of Defense, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Knowing all of this, your data is secured.
Pros And Cons Of Trim
Now that you have a better understanding of the Trim website, let’s talk about its pros and cons. It is important to discuss and underline both of them to help you decide whether Trim can help you out.
Pros Of Trim
- It’s simple and easy to operate.
- It has a fee-based service that will not charge you unless it can save you money.
- Has many free services.
- Has a financial board that you can maximize and help you plan, budget, and reach your financial goals.
- Helps you save up to 30% with your utility bills such as internet, cable, and phone.
- Has many features you can use to help save money, lower bills, and a high yield savings account.
- Has a cancellation option for any subscriptions you don’t use.
- Allows you customized alerts and reminders for late fees or overdraft fees.
Cons Of Trim
- There is no mobile app, but its site is designed to be mobile-friendly.
- Trim charges you up to 33% of the annual savings, and you have to pay this fee upfront in a lump sum.
Other Budget Tools That Can Help Like Trim
Trim is not the only website to help you budget your finances, save money, or lower your bills. There are a lot of similar websites that you can check out.
YNAB
YNAB or You Need A Budget allows you to automatically link your bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, etc, to the app. Far from the budgeting apps which will organize the spending on your behalf, YNAB users are the one who selects as to where their money gets placed.
For instance, if you want to have lunch with a friend instead of taking it straight from your checking account, you might want to check and pull out from the eating out category. If the balance is too low, that’s a sign that you don’t have enough money to go for lunch.
YNAB lets its users customize by assigning dollars, setting saving goals, adjusting budgets, and more. This will help you learn to discipline yourself and pace your wants and needs according to the budget you have decided.
Start My Free YNAB Trial Today >>
Mint
Mint is a free financing app that lets you link all your financial accounts in one digital location so that you get to see the overview of your financial health status. Mint also allows its users to track their weekly or monthly expenses, savings and set saving goals.
Using the Mint app, you can sync up your money management accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, retirement, investments, and more. You may choose to receive reminders of your bill due to date to avoid late payment fees.
Once you have connected your financial accounts, Mint will track your transaction history and then organize them by category budget to track it. Mint’s users may customize the category that fits their needs. You may check out our full Mint review to know more about the services of the app.
TrueBill
There’s also TrueBill. This is a financial tool too that provides assistance in managing subscriptions, lowers your bills, and utilizes your spending. Truebill has helped its users save more than $100 million.
This platform synchronizes with your credit card and bank accounts to track your recurring expenses. To do so, you can click through your list of bills and view which ones you don’t use anymore, and cancel it.
TrueBill also has a negotiating feature. If you like to lower your bills or request a fee refund, you just have to upload your statements to the platform. Unfortunately, you will have to pay the cost of 40% of whatever amount you save.
Just like Trim, TrueBill has a premium selection that costs between $3 monthly and $12 monthly based on the features you chose. The premium features provide more ways to organize your finances, from saving to lowering down bills.
Harvest
Harvest is another financial tool whose purpose is to help you lower overdrafts and bank fees by assessing your account and mediating for refunds. Their services use machine learning to identify which of the fees will most likely be refunded.
If they have successfully gotten the fees back, they get to keep 25% of whatever has been reclaimed, and the other 75% will be for you. Similar to the other sites on the list, Harvest can help you monitor and check your spending patterns, determining recurring payments that can be canceled.
To Wrap It All Up – Trim Review
Dealing with your financial circumstances can be overwhelming, especially when issues, challenges, and problems arise. That is why people are turning to these tools to help them save money, lower bills, and create a customized budget that will work towards their financial goals.
Trim is the digital solution you are looking for to handle your finances, manage your expenses, and study your spending habits to help you save money. Trim is made to help you achieve your financial goals because it could lead to saving hundreds or thousands of dollars per year for you.
Start using Trim now, link your accounts, and start saving!
Marjolein is a financial consultant who has built over €4,000 monthly passive income and saves over 70% of her income. Read Radicals’ inspiring story, from stuck in the 9-to-5 to loving life. Feel free to send Radical a message at the bottom of this page