Track Your Spending With Pocketsmith
A few weeks ago I was contacted by the good people over at Pocketsmith (Affiliate Link). They asked me to check out their product, as they knew that I’m a big fan of tracking my spending and saving. This is not the first time a company has contacted me, but this is the first one I liked enough to take them up on it.
Their major selling point was that they could link international bank and brokerage accounts all in one place, to let you track your net worth, spending, and saving in multiple currencies. This is a major advantage over Personal Capital, which is an extremely popular option for this sort of service. But Personal Capital doesn’t do international. I’ve had many people ask me for an option for their overseas accounts, but until Pocketsmith, I didn’t have anything to recommend.
A few days later, I was able to make some time and work with the platform so that I could give a thorough review of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this new platform, as well as contact their team for questions and suggestions.
The Good:
The setup was pretty quick. I was able to find my accounts and log in from their platform, no matter the country and currency. This included banks in the US and the UAE, a US brokerage for my stocks and bonds, and Fundrise for real estate. It was useful to see all of it in one place. All in all, it took about 15 minutes to set up on my computer. The app on my phone linked flawlessly.
Their responsiveness. I’ve been in email contact with Olav and Karl with a couple questions and suggestions, and they always get back within 24 hours.
The app itself is easy to use, for the most part.
There is a free option. It doesn’t allow you to have all your international bank/brokerage accounts in one place, which to me is the major selling point, but it does allow you to have two accounts and track your expenses.
You can have two or more people on it, so if you have are married you and your spouse can both link your salaries and expenses, all in one place. This may be the best feature, because a lot of these expense trackers only work for one person, including the one that I have used, “Spending Tracker”.
The Bad:
There was a slight hiccough with currencies, but it was easily fixed. I had to set the currency twice on accounts that weren’t in my “Home currency”. It wasn’t hard, I just went into settings, but it was confusing at first.
The Ugly:
The good stuff isn’t free 😞. They have several plans detailed below, but the one that I’ve been using is $9.99 a month.
The expense tracker still seems a bit clunky to me. This is especially true if you mostly use cash to purchase things. Maybe I just need to use it more often, but I had to create a separate account for cash purchases, and then entering the data seemed to take a bit longer than I’m used to.
So, who is this aimed at: To me, this would be best used by Expats who are married or just have multiple accounts around the world and want one place to keep track of it all. Any Expat with multiple accounts would benefit though. Whether or not it’s worth $9.99 a month to you, well, that I can’t answer.
Keep in mind that the platform is new. They’re still making changes and fixing issues. I was quite impressed by how fast they got back to me, and I think that bodes well for their success.
If you do think this is something you’re interested in, please click my affiliate link here.