Truebill App Review: How To Manage Subscriptions And Lower Your Bills
By Ashley Rogers
Spending
Our Truebill app review can be broken down into these two amazing features: cancel unused subscriptions and lower your bills. If you are like us, you have several bills that you pay each month. Whether you binge on Hulu, order hair color in a box, or pay prem-o for internet, subscription billing can run rampant if you’re not careful.
*Note: Truebill is now called “Rocket Money.” Check out this article for a full Rocket Money review.
According to a study by Waterstone Group, 84% of Americans underestimate how much they spend each month on subscription services. Participants estimated they spent $79.74 each month on subscriptions. After digging into the numbers, the study showed people actually spent $237.33 per month on subscriptions. That means people are paying $157.59 then they thought they were.
That’s where Truebill comes into play. Truebill saves you money by finding and cancelling unused subscriptions for you as well as lowering your bills. Rather than looking through your bank and credit statements manually for each subscription, the Truebill app helps you keep track of subscriptions so you can change your behavior. Let’s go over the best features of the Truebill app.
This app could be the key to saving you money each month!
How does Truebill work?
First, you will have to connect your bank account or credit card account to Truebill. Rest assured your information isn’t sold to third-parties, but there are a few ads for insurance and credit card companies.
Once everything is synced correctly, you can easily view all of your bills in one spot. Plus, it shows you what you frequently spend money on. Oh yes, your Chipotle addiction is included.
The app can send you notifications when they notice changes in your bills and gives you the opportunity to have them lowered on your behalf.
Manage your subscriptions
This is easily one of our favorite features in our Truebill app review. When you sync your checking and credit accounts to Truebill, in roughly two minutes the app pulls data from all recurring bills, like Netflix, looks for any bill changes, and determines whether or not they can negotiate lower rates for you. More than likely you are paying for things that you don’t need. This can get especially tricky to monitor when you are set up on a recurring automatic subscription. Truebill manages your subscriptions so you can save on monthly bills. Another subscription feature that we like is that your bills are organized by the calendar date so you can see when those bills hit your account. If you pay any of your bills manually, this can be extremely helpful so you don’t miss a due date.Truebill can lower your bills
Truebill can negotiate your bills for a lower rate. There is a 40% fee based off of how much you save. You avoid taking time out of your day to listen to hold music and leave the negotiations to Truebill. They mostly deal with telecom providers like Sprint, AT&T, Cox, and Verizon but Truebill negotiates with around two dozen providers. Truebill touts that there is an 85% chance that they can lower your phone, internet or cable bill. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of those odds? If you have ever dealt with trying to lower your internet or cable bill, you know how hard this can be. Not only do you have to dig up a secret phrase or passcode just to get customer service to speak with you, but there’s also another valuable component you are giving up: your time. We put this feature to the test. With Truebill, one of our The Money Manual editors was able to lower her internet bill by roughly $8 per month (see video above). This was an annual savings of $100 of which she paid 40%, or $40, to Truebill.What’s in the Truebill premium feature?
There is a paid feature to the app which gets you access to automated cancellations, custom spending categories, automated savings, and refunds on overdrafts and late fees. It’s $4.99 per month, so is it worth it? Let’s say you rarely incur an overdraft fee and this time you made a mistake. The Truebill app can request an overdraft fee waiver on your behalf. The average overdraft fee is $35 so upgrading to premium to avoid the fee could be beneficial. Plus, the cancellation feature is a big bonus. Trying to cancel your cable bill, for instance, can be time-consuming. Customer service is trained to get you to stay, thus wearing on your patience and increasing your frustration. This feature alone might be worth the premium cost even if just temporarily.Final thoughts on the Truebill app
Anyone who has multiple bills and wants to optimize their savings without wasting time should give Truebill a try. With more and more products offering subscriptions over one-time purchases, even people who closely watch their spending could see benefits from this app.If you are interested in learning more about Truebill, head here.
