Personal finance apps could save money
With many millennials turning to their smartphones to pay up, instead of digging into their wallets for cash, it’s little surprise that everyone from startups to big banks want to smack a financial app on all those mobile wallets.
Splitting the cost for tickets for an upcoming football game or concert is easy with apps like Venmo, Square Cash and Zelle.
“You risk looking old-fashioned paying with cash or credit cards,” said April Rudin, founder of the Rudin Group, a financial services marketing firm in New York.
And we’re going to hear more about sending money via smartphone after Apple launched its iOS 11 system. One feature of the new iOS 11 system — which will not be available until later this fall — is that you won’t even need to download a new peer-to-peer payment app. It’s embedded in the software update. The feature called Apple Pay Cash will compete with Venmo, Zelle and others.
Wondering what other personal finance apps are out there? Here’s a look:
■ Want someone to help you think about your finances when you’re swamped juggling jobs, shopping for a car or even planning a wedding?
Some apps — such as Wela — offer advice when it comes to how to pay off debt or save for retirement. Sign up for the free app and you’ve got a robo-adviser named Benjamin.
The Benjamin bot gives customized answers based on your financial picture after aggregating information from more than 13,000 financial institutions.
Matt Reiner, CEO for Wela, said consumers in their 20s and 30s are trying to do a lot at their age and want to know how much they can spend guilt-free, while saving toward bigger goals.
The ever-popular Mint.com has an app on how to track how you’re spending your money and how to budget, too. Some bank apps give budgeting advice, too.
■ Want to find a few bucks here and there to cover your student loans?
The new Fifth Third Momentum app for the bank’s debit card customers can cut about three years of payments off the student loans that many millennials are carrying, says Timothy Spence, chief strategy officer for Fifth Third Bank.
The game plan: If you set aside extra cash regularly, you’re paying off some of what you borrowed and the interest doesn’t keep building on that principal amount.
How you do it: If you’re a Fifth Third customer, you download the app, input your student loans and decide if you’d add an extra dollar each time you use your debit card or just round up the purchase to the next dollar.
Essentially, you’re rounding up to pay it down.
■ Want to start investing on the go?
Some millennials use an app called Acorns — which calls itself a “micro-investing” app. The idea is to target small amounts of money toward investments. Again, you’re rounding up daily purchases made with a debit card.
Acorns has five diversified portfolios that range from conservative to higher risk. You can pick and even change your mind later.
Most people pay a $1 monthly fee. College students are free. And people with an account of $5,000 or more pay 0.25 percent in fees per year. Some promotions offer ways to avoid the fee.
In an industrial space tucked off a side street in Seattle’s Sodo District, Microsoft is trying to reinvent the data center.
Twenty racks of servers sit in a stark, white, well-lit room — a familiar setup for anyone who’s visited one of the data centers that make up the humming infrastructure powering the internet.
To see what’s special about this one, look up: Sitting on a steel frame above each stack of computer hardware is an electrical cabinet the size of a mini-fridge. Inside is a natural-gas-powered fuel cell.
That technology, Microsoft engineer Sean James says, could allow future data centers to someday unplug from the power grid entirely.
By generating electricity close by — literally on top of the computing hardware — Microsoft’s new design eliminates the inefficiency of producing electricity at a distant power plant and transporting it long distances to data centers. That could trim the energy footprint of the fast-growing data-center business, eliminating a portion of the carbon emissions that fuel global warming, and, in the process, save Microsoft a lot of cash.
The American arm of Yamaha Motor Corp. will begin selling its first branded power-assist electric bicycles.
The Japanese giant, which manufactures everything from motorcycles and musical instruments to personal water scooters and motorboats, will begin selling Yamaha Power Assist Bicycles through U.S. dealers in 2018.
Yamaha has been in the e-bike business for decades, as a designer and builder of electric bicycle power trains. The company said it has produced more than 4 million drive units for other brands.
These will be the first Yamaha bicycles sold in the U.S.
“The U.S. electric bicycle market is growing, and we see an opportunity for Yamaha to enter with our long history of power-assist bicycle innovation,” said Rob Trester, a business development executive with the company. “Yamaha has been studying the market closely, and we see a strong growth trend.”
Four prototype bikes, shown
The company’s Seattle trial is preliminary. But if Microsoft’s estimates hold up — and, a big if, the cost of fuel cells comes down — the savings of a fuel-cell-based design spread across the company’s fleet of facilities could total hundreds of millions of dollars.
James sums up the prevailing view of the plan among the rest of the industry, a group that includes many conservative engineers content to tweak existing designs on the margins: “They think I’m crazy.”
As long as there have been computers, there have been data centers.
The corporate backrooms that housed mainframe computers in the 1970s and 1980s evolved into cavernous spaces full of the servers that underpin the modern internet, storing emails, videos, business tools and the content of websites.
With demand for those services surging along with highspeed internet use, web giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as specialists like Digital Realty and Equinix, are scrambling to build warehouse-size data centers across the globe.
That business is a massive, and growing, consumer of energy.
Data centers account for about 2 percent of U.S. electricity use, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence at the annual Interbike cycling convention in Las Vegas in September, will be offered to retailers. The production models will wear the traditional Yamaha tuning fork emblem, which harkens back to the company’s roots in musical instruments.
They are the UrbanRush, YDXTORC, CrossCore and CrossConnect, and run the gamut from Berkeley National Laboratory estimates, up from 0.8 percent in 2000. To cut their costs, companies like Microsoft have designed their newer facilities with energy efficiency in mind.
They’ve also reduced their dependence on fossil fuels by buying renewable energy or building their own wind or solar farms.
But Lucas Beran, who tracks data-center energy economics for IHS Markit, says the industry’s efficiency improvements have started to stall.
“In the next few years, we’re going to be at a crossroads,” he says. “We’ll have to change what we’re doing to maintain those energy gains.”
James and the team of data-center engineers at Microsoft say they’re set to take the next jump forward.
Understanding their thinking requires a tour of a typical data center.
Modern facilities run like small, virtually unpopulated cities, sprawling sometimes across more than 100 acres.
A few dozen technicians manage things from a control room, supplemented by contractors when something goes wrong. Inside central rooms are neat rows of metal cages that hold racks of humming servers. Those stacks churn out a lot of heat, requiring sleek racing bike to mountain bike to street cruiser.
Power-assist bikes typically use an electric motor and on-board electric battery to add propulsion to the traditional pedal-andchain system. The power can be turned on or off, and dialed low to high, depending on how much energy the rider desires to use.
In most jurisdictions, the bikes industrial-scale air circulation and cooling systems to keep things from overheating.
Powering all of that is a maze of electrical equipment.
Big data centers typically require their own substation-sized link to the power grid. From there, transformers and switchgear convert incoming electrical current to a lower voltage and regulate its flow with backups, surge protectors and miles of bundled copper wiring.
Because a sudden loss of power could cripple the facility and erase data, backup batteries also are plugged into the grid. As a last line of defense, diesel generators the size of shipping containers sit ready to go from cold and quiet to roaring full power in a few seconds.
Microsoft’s fuel-cell concept would eliminate most of that equipment.
No generators, no stacks of batteries, no transformers, no bundles of electrical cable.
Christian Belady, a longtime data-center engineer who manages Microsoft’s data-center design and research, has hyperbole at the ready to describe the company’s push to resist traditional thinking.
“I want the data center to disappear,” he says. “And I want energy for free.” are limited to 20 mph. Many can be ridden up to 50 miles before running out of electricity and can be recharged in two to four hours. In price, they run from several hundred dollars to many thousands.
Although electric-assist bicycles are popular in Europe and Asia, they have been slower to catch on in the U.S.
A recent report from the consulting firm eCycleElectric said that approximately 250,000 e-bikes were sold in America last year, representing 70 percent growth over 2015. Other estimates suggest the business could double again this year.
But Harlan Flagg, a veteran electric bicycle and motorcycle retailer who owns the popular shop Hollywood Electrics, said the newcomers may be late to the game.
“Yamaha is a well-known and respected brand, but the market is already pretty saturated with manufacturers,” Flagg said. “This is a very competitive space. The opportunity for a manufacturer to have a huge impact has probably passed.”