When it comes to managing personal finances, powerful automated tools may be your answer. RentPlus provides customers with RentPlus Money, an empowering personal, financial management tool that allows you to organize, track and control their money. You will also be able to aggregate all your accounts in one place, view your income and spending by category, create a powerful budget, as well as set meaningful and attainable financial goals. RentPlus has helped thousands of renters build their credit, become better educated in financial matters and manage their money more successfully.
Here is a more detailed look at each of the 8 RentPlus Money features:
Accounts
RentPlus Money is your Digital Money Management Solution. This Digital Money Management Solution lives inside your online banking environment. This tool allows you to aggregate all of your accounts from all of your different financial institutions into a single view. Instead of logging into 4 or 5 or 6 different financial institutions just to see your balances or transactions, you can log into RentPlus Money and get all of that information in one place.
Transactions
Within the “Transactions” tab, you will have the ability to view the transactions for all of your accounts in a clean and categorized layout. On this tab, you can update the category if needed. For example, if you spent money at a gas station for a soda it might be categorized as “Gas”. At this point you can click on the category and update it to better align with what the transaction really is. Because RentPlus Money does a great job at cleansing the transaction information, updating a transaction category will not be something you will have to do very often.
Spending
The spending tool shows you all of your spending across different categories. By clicking on a category you can drill down into the subcategories and click on a subcategory to view each transaction included in that subcategory. You will see that this is a common design theme within RentPlus Money. We give you a high-level overview of your as well as the ability to view the details behind your finances. You can also view your income from this report by clicking on toggling from “Spending” to “Income” at the top of the spending tool.
Budgets
One of the most powerful things about RentPlusMoney is that it will create your budgets based on your average monthly spending for each category from the 90 or so days of transaction history that is pulled in once you link all of your accounts. If you need to make changes to any of your budget bubbles, simply click on the bubble and update the budgeted amount. Bubble budgeting is a very different way of looking at budgets than what most people are used to.
Bubble budgets are about visualization of actionable and understandable information. With RentPlus Money’s bubble budgets, your eyes are immediately drawn to the areas that need the most attention. The red bubbles and the biggest bubbles first. Red means you have exceeded one-hundred percent of your budgeted allowance. Yellow means that you are between eighty and one-hundred percent of your budgeted allowance and green means that you are still under that eighty percent mark.
The size of the bubble represents the amount of the budget, so the bigger the bubble, the bigger the budget. Simple, right?
Trends
The “Trends” tab gives you a view of your income, shown as the green line, and your expense categories over an extended period of time. Of course, the most important thing within this tab is to spend below your income. One of the best and most important things you can do for your financial health is to spend below your means, or in other words, don’t spend more than you make.
Debts
The debts tool will help us look at debts with a long-term perspective as opposed to the shorter-term monthly payments on those debts. RentPlus Money automatically organizes your debts in order of the fastest pay-off first. Based on the balance, APR, and minimum payment we can calculate when the very last payment on that account will be.
The reasoning behind this is we want you to gain the motivation and gratification that comes from having paid off that first debt. This will help you get in the habit of using the debt snowball strategy. In some cases, you will need to input the APR and minimum payment amount for your debts. These can be found on your monthly financial institution statements.
Net Worth
Net worth takes everything into account. How much you have (your assets), how much you owe (your liabilities), how much you earn, save, spend, and pay towards debt. This report shows how much your net worth has increased or decreased each month and why. When you click on any of the specific months you can see the details for your gains and losses.
Increasing your net worth comes from behaviors like paying off debt, saving money, or spending less than you earn. On the flip-side, your net worth decreases from behaviors like spending more money on a credit card than you can afford to pay off or taking money out of savings. Your net worth is a powerful overview of connecting the dots to understand how your financial behaviors and habits are impacting your financial growth or your ability to reach your financial goals.
Goals
The “Goals” tool is a great way of planning ahead and visualizing how long it will take you to reach your financial goals. When you set up this section of RentPlus Money, a wizard will walk you through the process of setting up different goals. It will prompt you to create an emergency fund and we recommend that you save at least one-thousand dollars for a rainy day.
The goals tool will also prompt you to set goals for paying off any of your debts. This can be really helpful for unbudgeted debt, maybe credit cards, but I wouldn’t recommend that you use this for budgeted debts like an auto loan. Using the slider bar on the right you can move backward or forward in time to view far distance goals like retirement or saving for a child’s education.
RentPlus Money is another great reason to sign up for RentPlus. RentPlus members get this feature at no additional cost. How can these 8 features benefit you?
