Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtm1260 | Hacker News Reader

Highly recommend an app like truebill or something that analyzes your bank account! I found subscriptions to things I had totally forgot about etc. and saved a significant amount of money right away.

View on HN

How much value does this provide vs. just checking over your account history every month? It feels like a pretty high price to pay in terms of access to your data just to have them check for things that you could probably do by exporting a CSV and searching for things.

I've found it's not worth it. What I've had be most impactful is just to look at all the transactions on my accounts every paycheck. I notice subscriptions to cancel, spending I want to change.

I don't think looking at sums is actually much more powerful than looking at items. The count carries a weight. There's also no chance of analysis paralysis, slicing and showing things a hundred ways to avoid the heart of the matter. It's just you and the transactions. It leads to less understanding but better decisions.

Can I say, just having the transaction merchant name converted to a more human readable version makes it worth it in and of itself (there are probably some free services that do this).

How does one forget about a subscription? Doesn't everyone periodically review charges to their credit cards and bank withdrawals to make sure they make sense, and to pay bills that are due? If not, how do you know day-to-day how much money is available in your account or discover fraud? I'd be bouncing checks left and right if I didn't keep a close eye on my balances.

I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, so I'm not in the habit of looking at every transaction. The monthly/quarterly budget and subscription reviews that truebill prompts are massively helpful.

It is a bit aggressive in classifying recurring charges as subscriptions, but that's better than the alternative.

Ever start a trial and forget to cancel? I've found that's where a lot of mine came from. I think its a pretty universal experience.

I took a look at Truebill, and expected to find a list of supported banks somewhere, probably prominent on the landing page, as how are they supposed to be able to analyze my bank account otherwise?

But, there is no such information. Applications that reads data from banks keeps doing this, missing to display the single most important piece of data before I signed up.

Truebill supports most banks in the US.

Source: I work for Truebill.

We use Plaid for this support - there’s more detail here: https://help.truebill.com/en/articles/931156-i-can-t-find-my...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com