It is widely known that the country is not good at saving. Research by the Money Advice Service in 2015 showed that 16m people in the UK had less than £100 in savings. At Money Dashboard, we set out to get to the root cause of this problem with a view to creating a solution that helped people from every walk of life get on top of their finances. Our approach has involved hundreds of in depth users interviews & digging into the stats around how people use our service.
Our research really highlighted to us that most people don’t actually want to budget, nor do they want to save money for the sake of it. They want to achieve something, be that getting on the housing ladder (28%), paying off debt (19%), or taking the family on holiday (9%). They intuitively understood that being more disciplined with their spending would help them achieve the goals that matter to them, but they felt they needed support in doing this.
I was getting into tracking my money. I had this missing money at the end of the month and I was not sure where it had gone.
Control is about having a better understanding of how much I am spending, and what I am spending it on.
I’m really bad with money so I was looking for something to track my spend.
The good news is that when people are on top of their finances, they save a staggering amount! We've been working with researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of Edinburgh and the results are really encouraging.
The researchers, who specialise in behavioural economics, found that Money Dashboard really works to help users save money. They found that new users typically saved 14% of their discretionary spend in the first month. What’s more, engagement with the app correlates to budget compliance (aka. decreasing overspend) and each login can roughly be equated to £10 saving for an individual.
The bottom line? Visibility and control (two core things Money Dashboard can give you) are undervalued as a key drivers to affect behaviour change.
So whatever you want to achieve, from paying off debt, to getting on the housing ladder or taking the family on holiday, Money Dashboard can help you stay on track and save more simply by helping you be more aware of your spending habits. Going even further by creating budgets and tagging your spend creates even more value for you - which quite literally means more money in your pocket.
