Nearly every month, rates go up, rent goes up, shopping goes up, and costs ultimately go up. With the risk of recession growing, Australians have never been more stressed.
Predicting how your costs will go up isn’t easy, and isn’t on the mind of everyone, but it’s an important part of how we budget. Knowing what’s coming can help your budget weather the storm and prevent budget stress from spiralling out of control.
My app Simplsaver has made it easy for anyone with an iPhone to predict how their costs will rise, with a new built-in personal score for anyone using the app.
Your risk of recession score predicts how safe your budget should be if prices rise in categories likely to be affected. In just one step, a personal risk of recession is calculated based on your costs and salary, helping you to work out whether there’s a low, medium, high, or extreme risk of damage to your budget by using Australia’s Consumer Price Index (CPI).
When the cost of living goes up, there’s a metric to help us understand how much it’s going up by, but no one really thinks about it. We make that much easier by automatically doing the math and working out what CPI could do to your budget, and how much you’ll have left if prices keep on rising.
The addition of a personal recession risk score requires only a handful of costs and your salary in the app, all of which are stored entirely on your device and aren’t shared with anyone. In an age of data leaks and breaches, Simplsaver aims to keep your data private, because your financial data should be just that: private.
Simplsaver’s risk of recession score can be found out in just over 30 seconds, which is the amount of time it takes to start a budget using Simplsaver. From there, you can add costs of any kind, and the app will work out how much you should have left and whether you’re at further risk from inflationary rises.
If we can make those budgets more predictive, we can break down budgeting barriers and help people ride the risk of recession into cooler, calmer waters.
simplsaver is available on the App Store for the iPhone.
About simplsaver
There’s a consistent message on every book and website you can find about saving money. They all say “make a budget”. None of them ever say just how awkward that is to do.
If you’ve ever “made a budget”, you know all too well it consists of a spreadsheet you’ll fill up with information and never look at again.
If you’re lucky, you’ll check it once a year, but it won’t tell you a whole lot, and unless you’re a wizard with spreadsheets, you’ll sit there wondering why you did this in the first place.
simplsaver is a simple app designed to let you easily throw in your expenses and show how much they’re costing you.
- Simply enter your regular monthly salary, and then add your expenses using the plus sign on the main screen.
- Each expense will have its monthly and yearly costs calculated, and in turn, will tell you how much everything is costing you.
In short, simplsaver will show you what your regular spending is doing to your savings.
Once you know that, you might decide to cancel an account or service here and there. Some of these items will let you manage your accounts directly from a link inside the app, and that’s just the start.