Rounding up spare change to grow your savings

Coin jars are a classic way to save money. Any spare loose change jingling in your pocket gets tossed into the coin jar. Once the jar is full, you use a coin machine or exchange the coins at the bank for currency notes. Rounding up apps are now available as an alternative to traditional coin jars.

While coin jars are still used, the increasing trend of using cashless payments such as credit cards, debit cards, money apps etc, means that paying in cash is becoming less common. To keep up with the digital shift, the idea of round apps have gained more popularity Let’s see how these work:

What are Round-ups?

The idea is simple. Each time you make a purchase, calculate the difference between the purchase price and the rounded up number and put that difference into your savings account. E.g You buy a cup of coffee for £4.60. You calculate the difference between £4.60 and the rounded up number (£5.0) and you get £0.40 pence. You put £0.40 into your savings account. Do this for each purchase you make and watch how your savings account grows.

Manually

Track your spending on a spreadsheet app on your mobile or write them at down at the end of the day
Calculate the rounded up savings for each transaction and add all of them to get a final number.
Transfer the Total savings amount to your savings account.

Apps

Online apps are now available that can connect to your current and savings account and make the transfer to the savings account as and when you make a transaction. Depending on the app, the money can be automatically invested in a diversified portfolio. Some of the popular rounding up apps are :
Acorns: Acorn automatically rounds up your everyday purchases to the next dollar and automatically invests the spare change into your Acorns Invest account, https://www.acorns.com/round-ups/
Qapital: https://www.qapital.com/
Chime: offers a round up feature where each time you use your Chime cards to make a purchase, chime rounds up the transaction amount to the next dollar. The difference is automatically transferred to your Chime Savings account. https://www.chime.com/apply-debit-af/
Please do your research before joining any online apps.