Financial Alerts: Best Practices To Give You Effortless Control

Introduction

If there’s one thing to really appreciate about smartphones, it’s that we can now do stuff that used to require a phone call, a trip or an appointment.

This seems especially true with managing your personal finances. You used to have to wait in line at the bank, but now you can do your banking with a few taps, while you enjoy your morning coffee.

If you’re just starting to embrace technology for your personal finances, here are some best practices.

Getting Started With Personal Financial Management

The first step in managing your personal finances from your phone is to download the mobile apps for your bank and credit card issuers. This will let you access essential account features like checking your balances, making payments, transferring funds, redeeming rewards and more.

Managing your accounts on the go is incredibly convenient. But what if you want to know what’s going on with your account when it happens, instead of just when you open the app?

Setting Up Alerts and Notifications

Alerts and notifications are a great way to stay on top of your account activity in real time, but it does take a bit of setup to get things just right. We all get plenty of emails, text messages and notifications these days and you don’t want even more noise.

Choosing which alerts you get

First, go through your bank’s settings to pick the specific alerts you want to receive. You probably don’t want to be notified immediately of every single transaction that goes through, but critical alerts like low funds and payments due are good ones to have.

Some security-minded notifications you may want to enable include unusual account activity, your bank balance dipping below a certain unlikely amount, or if a transaction posts for a large amount. Having these can help you respond to credit card fraud or theft as soon as it happens.

Choosing how alerts are delivered

Besides setting up the specific alerts you want to receive, you can also personalize the way you receive them.

One good way to approach this is by urgency:

• Text message alerts and push notifications, which go straight to your phone, are useful for alerts you want to see as soon as possible, like suspicious activity or approaching your credit limit. The difference here is that text messages work through your default texting app, while push notifications are sent from a specific application — in this case, your bank or credit card app — and may direct you back to that app when tapped. 
• Email reminders are good for less urgent updates or if you frequently check your email anyway. Funneling some alerts to your email inbox is also a good way to avoid notification overload.

Further Tracking With Financial Apps

There’s more to personal financial management than your bank and credit card apps and alert features.

Many other popular apps can help you with budgeting and tracking your finances, depending on your priorities.

These include YNAB (formerly You Need a Budget) and Goodbudget, which can track your accounts with a focus on day-to-day spending and budgeting systems.

Meanwhile, Quicken Simplifi, Rocket Money, My Money from Yahoo Finance and Empower are good if you want to track your transactions and have a broad overview of your spending, balances, retirement accounts or even net worth, all in one place.

Most of these financial apps can sync with your accounts to pull information in automatically. And they may also offer their own notifications and alerts to help you stay in the loop. You can use these to replace or enhance the alerts you’ve already set up.

Bottom Line

Personal finance management from your smartphone isn’t just about having convenience: It’s about taking control.

Taking some time to set up alerts and explore some apps can help you be efficient and stay informed. The smartphone age is truly a good time for embracing the personal part of personal finance.

If you’re already a Credit One Bank cardmember, check out the Credit One Bank mobile app. It offers many of the features covered here, as well as free online credit score access.

And if you’re looking for a new credit card that pairs with that feature-packed mobile app, see if you pre-qualify for one. It only takes a moment to check and there’s no impact on your credit score.