The Best Alternative to Simple’s Banking App

Also my favorite way to budget money.

Lance Cummings PhD
5 min readJan 13, 2021

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Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

I believe the reason we have such trouble budgeting isn’t because of our ineptitude. We fail at budgeting because we do it the wrong way. This is what my wife and I learned while using Simple’s innovative banking app … which BBVA USA is shutting down. When I received the email, I gasped. If you are a Simple user, you are probably wondering … what now? If you are not a Simple user, you might be wondering … what’s the big deal?

What Makes Simple Great?

If you’ve looked at financial apps at all, you most likely will notice that all of them function on the same basic principle — spending categories.

See ReadWrite’s article on personal financial apps for a quick run down of the most popular.

You designate a certain amount of money to each category. You either don’t go over that amount or don’t spend it all (depending on if you are using a traditional or envelope method). Either way, you have to spend time managing the categories ……

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Lance Cummings PhD

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