Take Control of Your Financial Future with Personal Finance

 

While there are many apps you can use to budget, track your spending, and eliminate your debt, Pioneer offers our Personal Finance tool through Online Banking or our Mobile App. We bring together all of your accounts, bills, and more, so you can conveniently manage your finances from one, easy-to-use dashboard.

You may be wondering, what is account aggregation and why is it important?

Account Aggregation works by compiling information from different accounts. This may include various bank accounts, credit cards, investments, loans, and other personal or business accounts into one single place. By doing so, you are able to have a complete 360-view of your finances to make smart financial decisions.

To start, log in to Online Banking and under ‘Tools,’ click ‘Personal Finance. Here’s how you can utilize Personal Finance to the fullest.

Transactions gives you an overview of all spending across all accounts with the ability to search or filter to find something specific. With all of your transactions in one view, it is much easier to stay on top of your accounts, ensuring no unauthorized transactions slip through the cracks.

How much do you spend on groceries or eating out each month? Shopping or entertainment? The Spending Pie will make it easy for you to quickly identify your biggest expenses each month. If a purchase is incorrectly categorized, you can easily edit it by clicking on the category and choosing from the drop-down box.

With such a clear view of your spending, you’ll find it easy to spot any holes in your wallet where you’re giving away money to areas that you don’t receive any value back for. Look for items like unused subscriptions, or purchases that you can trim back on such as impulse shopping.

The Bubble Budgets tool is a great way to create your budget. Before you get started, be sure to add all of your spending accounts and that all transactions are correctly categorized. This tool can generate a budget for you based on previous spending history, so the more complete your history, the more accurate your initial budget will be.

This is a great way to visualize how big each category is in relation to the rest of your budget. Red bubbles have exceeded their budget limit, yellow bubbles are between 80-100% of their allowance, and green bubbles are still under 80% of their allowance. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the budget.

The benefit of visualizing your budget is that your attention is drawn to the spending categories that need it most, rather than spending time on all of the little details.

What are your financial goals? Are you saving for a house or building up your emergency fund? Goals can help you plan for short and long-term financial goals with the ability to plan months, years, and even decades into the future. You can set savings, debt payoff, or retirement goals.

Setting goals allows you to plan for your future with confidence.

The Debts tool will help you prioritize your debt and pay it down faster so you can save on the money you would otherwise spend on interest. By enabling this tool, it can calculate when each debt will be paid off and when you’ll be completely debt-free if you keep paying the minimum amounts. Then, it applies the ‘Debt Snowball Strategy’ to show you an accelerated debt payoff timeline. By doing this, you could save thousands on interest without the need for big budget cuts.

Alerts can help you stay in touch with your finances by notifying you of important updates. Simple Alerts will be enabled automatically and you will be emailed with updates. Please note, in order to set up Alerts, your email address must be verified.

Take control of your finances with Personal Finance. To get started, log-in to Online Banking. If you need guidance on your financial journey, stop in, and speak to a branch representative today to find out how we may be able to help.