I set up rules (pictured below) to accommodate those. Most of the time, I get reimbursed via Venmo for certain transactions (a) for around the same amounts and (b) around the same time of month for each purchase that I split. This was one of the cool things I noticed right away: The good news? It was actually pretty easy to assign the correct Venmo charges to the right categories. The estimate would guess double my actual out-of-pocket cost because the transactions themselves were twice as big. I noticed that normally happened for categories where I pay for something and then get reimbursed for someone else’s half (think utilities, groceries, rent, etc.). Most of them were freakishly spot-on, but some of them required additional tweaking on my part. The first thing that I had to do (after syncing my accounts) was begin correcting or approving Copilot’s estimates. Months of unrefined data poured in, and I had a brief moment of panic: As someone who checks, categorizes, and combs through her Mint data multiple times a day, seeing the last year of my life begin to populate willy-nilly in the app freaked me out and I almost aborted the mission. I had heard Copilot was really “smart” – that it was a budgeting app that understood real life.īut I have to admit, when I first started syncing all of my accounts (which, by the way, were all available with the exception of my obscure HSA fund – but my random 401(k) provider and all other accounts were easily able to be synced with no issues), I was a little overwhelmed. I used my Wealth Planner back in January to determine how I was going to spend in 2021, and then simply created those budgets in Copilot so the app would track my spending (that way, I don’t have to keep track of my transactions and spending manually).Īt the end of the month, I record the category totals in my Wealth Planner for accountability and record-keeping – the Wealth Planner is built to give you end-of-month and end-of-year summaries, because data is sexy and makes you rich. While it may be obvious, I want to make sure we’re on the same page here: I don’t use the budgeting app to decide what my budget should be (though Copilot does analyze your spending and give you accurate estimates for each category). I didn’t want Copilot to be the one that got away. I played around with the dummy data and immediately felt envious.Ī few months passed, and my curiosity finally got the best of me. Never mind.”īut I noticed demo mode, and it was enough to pique my interest. I downloaded it so quickly, the App Store almost crashed. The UI is fantastic – one of the founders was a software engineer at Google.” My friend Richard is a quintessential Silicon Valley tech buff (a 2x start-up founder, no less), and when I told him about Money with Katie, the first thing he said was: “Cool! Have you ever heard about Copilot? All my friends love it. While I was always a Mint purist ( “And if it doesn’t work for you, you’re just not trying hard enough!” I’d say when people would tell me it just wasn’t working), the more my recommendation was met with hesitancy or defeat, the more I felt compelled to find a solution for budgeting that would do for spending what Betterment did for investing. I should disclose upfront that I work professionally in user experience strategy, design, and writing – so when an app has a really stellar UI, I get jazzed.
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