Kiwis Keen to Grow Passive Income and Cut Costs
Debut is building a next-generation banking product in New Zealand and working with Kiwis in the community to make sure we hit the mark. A huge thank-you to those who took part in our recent poll! We asked Kiwis to let us know what is most important to them when they’re looking to free up some money.
The Poll Results
Different channels limited the amount of text we could include in the poll, but essentially we asked people the following.
When it comes to saving and earning money, what is most important to you?
- Cutting expenses as much as possible
- Generating small amounts of passive income
- Some combination of both
Overall, people were tied on whether a passive income or cutting expenses was most important and the majority opted for some combination of the two.
Based on the poll and comments from the community, we can see that Kiwis are ideally looking for tools to help them identify where they can reduce their spending to free up some of their money along with ways to help them grow their money. This is incredibly exciting and has further energised our efforts to deliver on both of these customer desires.
Below are a few of the ways Debut plans to help.
How Debut helps you cut expenses
Our goal with Debut is to help people to have more control over their money, so we want to be very mindful about how we go about setting up tools that help people to make better decisions, rather than setting restrictions or nagging people.
Debut helps you to group spending by type.
With most traditional banking services, all of your transactions are just shown to you in a big list. Debut works in the background to automatically group spending into categories for you. You can see all your spending or what your outgoings are in a particular area. Your spending categories are private, so no one else will know you had Macca’s twice in one week. You do you, boo.
If Debut isn’t sure about how to categorise something, it’ll ask you and remember for next time.
Debut helps you to visualise where your money is going.
We want you to be able to see how your spending changes over time, that’s why we’re building charts right into the first page you see. That way you can quickly spot when spending in one area has gotten out of control.
Debut helps you to identify and track trends.
Spending more on something than you usually do? Debut can let you know automatically. This is just a way to bring awareness to larger spending trends without judgement or shame. Customers trying to cut back may choose to scale back in other areas.
Image Description: Notification from Debut: Been shopping lately? Debut here! It looks like you’re spending more on shopping this month. Hope you got something good.
Debut makes setting up a budget effortless.
Debut is smart and already knows about your spending patterns. Debut will automatically offer to help you keep spending under a limit for a category or you can set a limit in the category view.
Debut helps you stick to your budget.
Debut can let you know and give you a heads-up when you’re getting close to reaching your budget. If you go over your budget, Debut can suggest a more realistic budget more in-line with your spending history.
When you stick to your budget or stay under your budget, we’ll help you celebrate and offer to put a little extra towards your savings.
Debut helps you to plan for future spending.
Debut helps you to identify recurring expenses, like bills, memberships or a weekly grocery shop and helps you to automatically set aside money to cover those expenses. If Debut sees an expected recurring expense that’s coming up soon and there’s a chance you might not have enough to cover it, you’ll get a heads-up. We’re excited about these trend-based notifications. These are timely notifications and could be just the right nudge to recognise whether you’ve got enough to buy lunch out that week or if you should rather bring something from home.
Debut provides you with a personalised summary of your week. Like a quick recap on your spending.
Once Debut has started to learn your trends, you’ll start to receive personalised weekly recaps to summarise your spending and growth activity for that week. Here, you’ll also get a heads-up of upcoming expected expenses for the week ahead and whether you’ve been above average for a given category so that you can be mindful of how you spend when you’re out and about.
Plus, we’ll let you know when you’ve done well to stick to your budget.
Debut helps you avoid ongoing subscription fees.
Signed up for a subscription you no longer need? If you used a Debut virtual card, you can just switch the card off.
How Debut helps you to generate passive Income
Debut grows your money on autopilot.
Your Debut account will always give you the best interest rate for every dollar in your account. Earn bit-by-bit or chunk-by-chunk.
Debut rounds up your change and saves it for you.
Round-up expenses to the nearest dollar and put the leftover directly into your savings.
Debut helps you to save.
Set savings goals for the things you want. You can have one goal or many.
When you spend less than your average or your set budget, you can send what’s left over directly to your Savings Sheds. Extra change from Change Round-Up gets distributed to your Savings Sheds automatically.
With Debut, your savings account is smarter too. Savings Sheds allow you to earn the right rate depending on what you’re saving for.
We here at Debut think that this strikes a great balance between helping customers find ways to cut expenses and generate passive income and we can’t wait to start delivering these features to you later this year.
Once again, thanks so much for participating in our poll. We’ll have many more of these in the future and hope you can join us in the next one as well.
Please note, Debut is not a registered bank under the Banking (Prudential Supervision) Act. This is about our future intentions. Investments with us are not supervised currently by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand
Related
Poll: When it comes to saving and earning money, what is more important to you?