Chip App Review: Saving for Christmas
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The New Year often comes with resolutions in all areas of our lives. These can be anything from losing weight or getting fitter to looking for a new job or even going travelling. Another area people often want to improve on, especially after Christmas, is their finances.
Chip App Review: How I’m Saving for Christmas
When it comes to saving I know a lot of people struggle with consistently putting money away. However, having a little pot of cash stashed away for Christmas 2020 could make a huge difference to your finances. Even if you only put away £10 a month, that’s over £100 to put towards gifts or the big Christmas food shop.
With this in mind, I’ve been using an app called Chip to automate putting money aside and help me save towards my goals. If you’re interested in giving
How Does the Chip App work?
Chip is an app that connects to your bank account and puts money aside at regular intervals throughout the month, roughly every four days. It makes stashing the cash easy and you don’t even have to think about it. These small transactions are called autosaves and the amount saved each time will vary depending on how much money you have in the account it’s moving money from, your spending habits and allowing for bills.
Provided you’ve fully connected Chip to your bank, the Chip app will never take money if it means you’ll be short for direct debits or will go into your overdraft.
Another benefit is Chip always lets you know well in advance when it’s going to make an autosave so you can cancel it if you really want to. You can also move any money you’ve put away back to your linked current account at any point – it’s not locked away and you can access it with ease if you need to.
You can also change the amount Chip auto-saves – there are five different levels so if you feel as though the last few transactions have been too much or too little it’s really easy to change them. You can pause Chip completely at any point too.
For a more detailed explanation of how it all works take a look at the Chip website.
How I’m Using The Chip App for Christmas 2020
I’ll admit the last couple of years haven’t been the easiest for us financially. Between both my husband and myself changing careers and me being on maternity leave, money has been tight and there’s not been a huge amount of spare cash to add to an emergency fund or Christmas pot.
However, things are definitely improving – I’ve been taking steps to diversify my income and my husband has finally qualified after two years of re-training.
So, with the new year approaching, I decided it was time to start stashing some cash away from our main current accounts with the notion we’d be less likely to spend it.
This is where the Chip app comes in. It’s been taking small regular amounts from my current account and honestly, I’ve not really noticed it. So far I have auto-saved over £90. I find having money saved away from my main bank means I’m less likely to spend it but it’s nice to know I can still access it if I need to.
Smash Your Goals
Another thing I like about using Chip is that it lets you set goals to save towards and you can split each transaction between those goals. At the moment I have two goals: Save £200 for Christmas 2020 and save £1000 in an emergency fund. Currently, 20% of my auto-saves go towards Christmas and 40% towards the emergency fund.
You can also allocate the money you already have saved with Chip to each new goal you set up (there is a maximum of three goals.) The rest, for me, is just a little pot that can build up and be used as and when I need it.
So far I’m really enjoying using the Chip app and it’s making putting money aside really easy. It even works with my varied self-employed income. Chip gets smarter the more you use it so will always aim to auto-save just the right amount of money for you personally.
This is a great idea! I always struggle as I tend to think I don’t have any money to save however really if a little was to go away without me really noticing I think I would be able to find that savings, whereas when I plan it I always think there isn’t enough!
This is exactly how I feel – you just learn to live on what’s left after that little bit has been taken out. It’s been working really well for me!