Here at Quizzle, we’re proud to offer a great selection of credit improvement resources, educational tips, and other tools to help people manage their finances – and we also like to highlight some of the other great tools online to help you save more of your money and live a more financially secure life.
One of the best personal savings tools is SmartyPig. SmartyPig is an online “piggy bank” that helps people save for specific goals like a wedding, vacation, car, a down payment on a new home, home improvement or other “big ticket” expenses. When you sign up for SmartyPig, which you can do through your free Quizzle account, you get a high-interest FDIC-insured bank savings account.
SmartyPig can help you figure out exactly how much you need to save each month and how many months it will take you to reach your savings goal.
Saving Made Social
Often, saving money is a solitary, sometimes lonely pursuit – spending money is fun and sociable; you can always go to the mall, go to a movie or meet at a restaurant with your friends. Too often, saving money feels like you have to cut yourself off from people and stay home alone, eating tuna fish sandwiches.
SmartyPig makes saving social by helping you publicize your savings goals to family and friends using social media channels like Facebook. In this way, SmartyPig transforms saving money from an isolating experience into something to share and celebrate.
With SmartyPig, you can actually show your family and friends (if you choose to) what you’re saving for, how much you’re trying to save, and you can even enlist their support – if your parents want to help chip in for a down payment on a house, or if grandparents want to help save money to buy plane tickets to bring the grandkids for a visit, SmartyPig makes it possible. You can create your own “SmartyPig widget” to post on Facebook or on other social networks, saying “Help Me Save for My Vacation,” for instance.
Even if you don’t get a lot of contributions, just the act of sharing your savings goals can have an important psychological effect. People will want to root for you and cheer you on – plus, by making your goals public, you will feel some positive “peer pressure” to hold yourself accountable to reach your goals.
Perhaps this will be one of the hidden benefits of SmartyPig in the long run – maybe instead of “keeping up with the Joneses” by spending beyond their means, more Americans will see how much their friends are saving, and will feel compelled to be more frugal.
Cash Back and Rewards Cards
In addition to some of the nation’s most competitive savings account interest rates, SmartyPig offers some impressive cash back rewards. After you’ve saved up enough money to reach your goal, you have the option of converting some or all of that money to be used as a retail gift card – from national retailers like Amazon, Lowe’s, Best Buy, American Airlines and others. This gift card can give you up to 14 percent cash back on your purchases.
SmartyPig also offers a unique Cash Rewards Card, which is a debit card that can be used to spend the money you’ve saved in your online savings account. The SmartyPig Cash Rewards Card can be used at over 9,000 retailers and offers 10 percent cash back on everyday purchases.
A high interest savings account, help from family and friends and generous cash rewards – who could ask for more in a savings tool?
To learn more and sign up for your own SmartyPig savings account, visit Quizzle.com. At Quizzle, you’ll also get expert tips and tools to help you sock away more money for your special goal, like home loan recommendations that will let you know if you can save money on your biggest money.
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