Anne Boden - The Money Revolution: Easy Ways to Manage Your Finances in a Digital World

This book would never have been written without the help, support and knowledge of the exceptionally skilled team at Starling. I would like to thank each and every one of them. I would also like to acknowledge journalist Teena Lyons for assisting in getting the words onto the page and Greg Hawkins, our technical adviser, who read the book before it went to print and offered a number of hugely valuable observations.

I am also very grateful to Chris Cudmore and the team at Kogan Page who helped keep this book on track. Thank you also to Jeff Scott at Platypus PR for all his advice and to Starlings head of corporate affairs, Alexandra Frean, who made sure this book happened.

Theres no shortage of advice available when it comes to the money in our wallets. There are apparently countless ways to save more effectively, or get better returns on investments, or to pay back debts quicker. Some of it is useful, a lot of it is confusing and, worst of all, it is very easy to ignore altogether if you really would rather not think about it at all for now.

This book turns it all around. The Money Revolution is a simple guide to everything you need to know about the new, easy and transparent way to get control of your finances.

Thanks to technology, it is now possible to effortlessly know exactly what you have to save, spend and invest, down to the last penny or cent, now and for months and years to come. Our smartphones offer a dizzying array of possibilities to help keep track of our money, make it work harder and budgeting a breeze. If you want to know how to save money without even noticing it, or smoothly keep track of investments, or simply view all your incomings and outgoings in one place, there are dozens and dozens of apps for that. It doesnt matter if you are someone who has always been in the red, or if you dont even know what being in the red means: its great to know exactly where it is all going, so you can adjust course and keep everything in check if you need to.

The Money Revolution is divided into two parts. The first part gives a broad overview of all the latest developments in banking and finance and a snapshot of what you might expect in the near future. The second takes each aspect of our financial lives in turn, be it savings, mortgages, pensions or insurance, and describes the best apps currently available in the UK and around the world. There is no compulsion to read it in chronological order. You may like to dive right in, download some apps and start improving your money management right away. Thats absolutely fine: the choice is yours. You will find that all of the apps featured here are designed to be simple to use and easy to understand: no previous tech experience is required. This book is written along the same lines. I want you to get the best out of your money and hope to show you some fantastic tools with which to do it.

If youve ever made a silent vow to get your finances in order, this book will set you in the right direction.

You are in charge

Developments in smartphone and data sharing technology are transforming how we save, spend and invest our money. Our interactions with the world around us are now completely different thanks to sensors, cloud computing and WiFi, which surround us everywhere we go. With our every individual move noted and logged, it has become possible for us to be charged only for the actual time that we use particular services. To the second. Forget about dull, predictable monthly bills that have to be paid regardless of how much or how little you use a service: pay-as-you-go is set to become the new norm.

This book is a guide to some of the latest products and services that can and will transform the way you view and use your money. Thanks to a wave of new banking, savings, investment and pension apps it is now possible to understand more about your money and take control of it in a way you have simply never been able to do in the past. And dont worry, you dont have to be a tech genius or a money markets expert to understand it all. Thats the point. Most of the time all you will need is a smartphone and the will to make your cash work a bit harder for you.

You can, if you like, think of it as outwitting the established global finance industry that has previously thrived on the status quo where no one really understood what was happening with their hard-earned cash. This book will show you the most up-to-date financial tools available and how they simplify what happens with money, creating a more even playing field. I can even show you how to make money out of your banks, instead of them always making money from you. Yes, we are talking about the complete reinvention of the inefficient, over compensated, financial business model.

Its not that any reasonable person begrudges banks and financial institutions making money. They are, after all, businesses, and if they dont make money, they wouldnt be able to survive. No, it is the sheer amount of cash that many of the big firms make from their customers that has made many ordinary people baulk. Worse still, no one is ever really sure how they do it. In the past, finance has been one of the least transparent services available, and youd be forgiven for thinking that this is just how some of the large institutions like it. You dont need to scratch too far below the surface to find a breath-taking range of ways that they eat into your hard-earned cash. Free bank account? Not really. They make up the shortfall with inflated charges on interest and unauthorized overdrafts. Great loan deal? Maybe, but how much did you pay in fees? Going abroad? Check your statement when you get home because all those trips to international ATMs add up in ways youd never have anticipated.

The problem is, unless you are the type of person who always watches your bank balances, insurance premiums and pension contributions like a hawk and are on top of every single transaction, its not that easy to work out where it all goes. Payments are not always transparent, and fees on transactions are either hugely complex or neatly hidden away. Even if you are especially careful, there has frequently been no real way of getting to the bottom of what you are paying for in a service. It doesnt help that the smoke and mirror show around our cash is built on a foundation of myths about our money and what happens to it. These myths promote truths such as that banks can always be trusted to have your best interests at heart, or that independent advisers are truly independent, even though these beliefs have been disproved time and again (often in the most dramatic and ruinous ways). Meanwhile, glossy ads for any sort of financial services organization declare their customer friendly credentials, yet it has often been difficult to get any sort of coherent explanation about the products they back. Any information dispensed by the institutions that are supposedly championing our financial cause frequently feels very hard to come by too. Even so, the myths prevail and have helped to keep many people in the dark about their finances ever since they became adults and started earning a wage. The persistence of these uncertainties frequently makes anything to do with saving, spending and investing feel like a leap in the dark.

No one needs to put up with this confusion over money today. Banking, and indeed anything to do with managing our finances, has been undergoing a radical makeover. In fact, it would not be overstating it to say were going through the biggest and most rapid shift in our relationship with money for hundreds of years. Perhaps ever. Its a money revolution. Thanks to advances in technology, from machine learning, to artificial intelligence (AI), to robo-advising, there are widespread opportunities to not just understand more about where your money is going but also to take complete charge of it and make it work better for you.