We're thrilled to bring you a unique episode featuring Jacki's top picks for apps to make 2024 smoother and more efficient and financially sound- especially for those navigating life post-divorce.
This episode is crammed with valuable insights and recommendations from the field. Allow us to guide you on the path to success after divorce through this enlightening discussion!
To read about how Pearl Planning and Jacki Roessler, CDFA can help you though your divorce or schedule an initial complimentary consult, CLICK HERE
If you're already divorced and are looking for post-divorce financial planning from an advisor who specializes in this area, contact Melissa Fradenburg CLICK HERE TO SCHEDULE A CONSULT
CLICK HERE to read more about protecting your credit after divorce.
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Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Wealthy After Divorce podcast. Jackie Ressler, a divorce financial planner with almost 25 years experience, and myself, melissa Freidenberg, financial advisor with Pearl Planning. We are both certified divorce financial analysts and your co-hosts.
Speaker 2:
If you're thinking about divorce or in the process of divorce, this is a time for you to take a deep breath and give yourself permission to gain clarity on the financial decision they're facing, while the term wealth typically refers to money and possessions.
Speaker 1:
We know that truly being wealthy means a whole lot more Together with our guests on this podcast. We will help you live wealthy after divorce.
Speaker 2:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Wealthy After Divorce podcast. Today, this is Jackie Ressler, and I have a really fun topic that I'm going to be covering. Today, I am going to be talking about the best apps that I would recommend for 2024. Now I get asked all the time what would be good apps for post-divorce clients. I've done a test run of several apps myself and have some great recommendations for you for some things that can make your life easier in 2024. As I was recording this, my daughter, eva, came in and asked me if we were doing paid endorsements, and so I want to add make sure that our audience knows we do not accept any paid endorsements. We don't get any fees. These are just my personal recommendations for apps that I think would be beneficial for 2024.
Speaker 2:
So I have to start with parenting apps. These are the kind of apps that you can communicate with your co-parent after the divorce or even during the process of divorce. You can exchange information about expenses, you can exchange calendars. These are really valuable tools to keep communication positive for you and your co-parent. I'm going to talk about two different apps. The first one is the one that I think is the most well-known. It's Our Family Wizard and it's been around for a long time. It is a great app. You can upload calendars in there, you can communicate with your spouse and it will take a time stamp of the message. You can upload school schedules, emergency contacts for your children, doctors phone numbers, babysitter contact information, et cetera. You can also and again I'm always looking at things from how do we make life easier for expenses. You can also enter a log for shared expenses and you can upload receipts, and this would be a good way to handle that with your co-parent. One of the really cool things about Our Family Wizard is it has a tone meter add-on that you can get. It's pretty unique. If you go to draft a message to your co-parent and it senses that the tone is not necessarily positive, it will give you a warning, which is really giving you a breather before you hit the send button. So that's a nice feature. Our Family Wizard is more on the expensive side compared to some of the other apps. There are plenty of free apps that do some of the things that Our Family Wizard does, but again, this is one that's tried and true and, depending on where you are in the country, a lot of courts endorse and accept Our Family Wizard, so that's something to think about.
Speaker 2:
Another potential that I think is a great app for managing just the finances between you and your co-parent for kids is an app called Onward. That's O-N-W-A-R-D and for $10 a month. Again, these are all prices that are current as I'm recording this at the end of 2023. You can upload receipts, you can input expenses and it will automatically tell you if your co-parent what the percentage is that they owe. You can input hard code that into the app and it will send them a message and you can pay each other right through the app. So it is really fantastic. It is an app excellent way for parents that are communicating about extra curricular expenses for their children or other types of expenses that they want to make sure that they're tracking, and the fact that you can pay each other directly inside of this app is a big benefit. So I really like onward.
Speaker 2:
As a divorce financial advisor, I feel that there are three areas that really can help clients to ensure that they are walking down a financial path towards success, and those things are budgeting that be word. Putting together a budget and using a budget as a powerful tool for yourself, going forward after the divorce, taking care of your credit rating and making sure you're on top of that and making sure that your mental health is in a good and calm perspective. So let's look at the first area budgeting. I know I'm always on my soapbox about how powerful and empowering a budget is. It is. It's really true If you are budget adverse and this name budget just makes you feel kind of cringy.
Speaker 2:
This app that I found, I think, is the perfect app for you. So it's called a pocket guide. It's very simple. It does all the work for you. It's really fantastic. You.
Speaker 2:
There are many budgeting apps out there. There is there's Mint, there's Nerd Wallet, there are. There are many, many apps. A lot of them require manual entry and a lot of them are encouraging you to look forward with your budget. This particular app, pocket guide, I think is great for people that are divorced and haven't handled their finances before or that really want to get a handle on their finances for the first time, because it really is not forward looking, but it helps you track in real time what you're spending your money on and what you have left over after your basic expenses are hit for spending, so you can connect your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investment accounts and track bills, and it will tell you how much. Once you allocate what your main expenses are for the month, it'll alert you as to how much you have left over for discretionary spending, which I think is super simple and easy, and I highly recommend this as a starter to getting familiar with your budget in a very non threatening way.
Speaker 2:
The next app that I recommend to everyone is Credit Karma. Credit Karma is a free credit watch app. There's no cost for it. It does have some annoying pop up reminders that you need to turn off, but it is. It's really helpful in monitoring your credit Whenever you look at it. It can let you know every day, if you want, what your credit ratings are. It pulls it from two of the credit reporting sources, and what I like best about Credit Karma is that there's a really neat function that allows you to model, if you were to change something different about your current situation, how that might affect your credit rating. So, for example, if you put in there that you closed, let's say, you have 10 credit card accounts open and seven of them are things that you opened within the last year, that's having a negative impact on your credit rating. If you model what happens if I close out those accounts, for example, it will tell you how that might impact your score and it's kind of like watching your credit into a game, almost. So again, I highly recommend Credit Karma. It is a soft pull on your credit so it doesn't affect your credit rating to check it every day and it gives you alerts if there is something that is unusual, if there's been a new hard pull on your credit. It's a really great thing to have to make sure that your credit is in the right direction and also that your private, your personal information, is safe and people aren't there aren't credit cards opening your name that you're not aware of.
Speaker 2:
The last app I want to talk about is called Breathe. That's B-R-E-E-T-H-E and this is a personal favorite app of mine. I have so many apps that I use this one. I've had for maybe the longest of all of the apps on my phone and I find it really helpful. It was first recommended to me by a friend of mine who is in the health care profession and she recommends it for her patients and I think for me it's been extremely helpful. So what you can do is you open up the Breathe app you can, let's say, put in something like you need to take an emergency breath. It'll go through a breathing exercise with you for a short four minute meditation. You can do a five minute anxiety meditation a better sleep. For a half hour you can look at meditations that will help with insomnia, that get you to deep relaxation, calm beach sounds, ocean waves, bedtime, hypnotherapy and so on. So you don't want to have this app on in the car, as it reminds me every time I open it up, which is kind of silly, but it is. It's really helpful for those quick moments when you need to remember to take a breath and for people that are post-divorce. Stress happens and having something in your pocket that you can use that will help remind you to stop and take a breath is incredibly beneficial.
Speaker 2:
I hope that this series of recommendations on apps for you to try out in 2024 is helpful for you. We are coming up on the end of the year. We have one more podcast to close out the year, which will be in two weeks, and I hope that you'll all join us because we will have some really good year end tips and great ways to start your financial year off in 2024 with a band. So, as always, please like and subscribe to us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Share with friends and family. We would love to. We are, we are growing and we would love to keep growing when the more that you share, the more we're able to put out this content that we think is very valuable for listeners. Thank you for listening to the Wealthy After.
Speaker 1:
Divorce podcast. You can find more information on Melissa Friedenberg and Jackie Ressler on our website, wwwpearlplancom, as well as on our podcast website, wwwwealthyafterdivorcecom.