Keeping on top of your outgoings can feel like a job in itself. As I was wisely told once, “It’s not your income that makes you rich, it’s your spending habits.” With this in mind, we’ve launched our new budget management tool (Open Banking), to help organise, budget and monitor your spending – all through our existing free secure client portal. And the best bit is most of the organising is done for you as it’s automated.
It’s free and simple
Just by linking your bank accounts to our free Legal & Medical portal open banking will organise and track spending giving you all the data you need to fully understand where your money goes each month. It’s totally secure and no one sees the data but you – not even your advisor!
All Legal & Medical clients already have access to our free secure portal, where you can access all your investments, protection policies and other holdings. You can also see your key documents and send messages to your adviser via this portal. Open Banking is now an added feature.
If you are an existing client and haven’t already registered follow the link to gain access: Client Login
So, what is Open Banking and how does it work?
Your transactions are broken down by category, making it crystal clear what you are spending where. I was flabbergasted at my own Starbucks habit when I started using it!
It’s so helpful and empowering to see all of your finances in one place. Open Banking currently supports current accounts, credit card accounts and some savings accounts. Account balances and new transactions are automatically updated every day.
There are graphs, filters and search functions that allow you to analyse spending patterns over different time frames.
You can re-categorise transactions singly or in groups to improve and personalise your data – the categorisation engine also learns from re-categorised transactions to improve accuracy.
Notifications can be set for certain categories you spend most in weekly, and also when large transactions pass through your accounts.
Set monthly budgets for spending in categories and track your progress against those budgets.
Which banks will link to the app?
Marks and Spencer Bank, Nationwide, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Barclays, Santander, First Direct, MBNA, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Natwest, Bank of Scotland.
Other providers are expected to make their payment accounts available through Open Banking soon.
Sadly, it doesn’t work with joint accounts.
How do I set up Open Banking?
Just log into your Legal & Medical portal and follow the Open Banking instructions to link your accounts. This will make the “Spending” tab available to you in the personal finance portal, and you will be able to link your bank accounts from there.
As we take on 2023 why not set a goal to bring a greater sense of control to your finances and hopefully less stress?
Be assured your data is totally secure and never shared with a third party.
For more budgeting tips: 5 ways budgeting could improve your life
Why not tell us how you budget? Let us know by leaving a comment below.