finance

The free money app that will save all your friendships.

I am supremely lazy. The kind of lazy where I will watch a movie I hate right through to the end if I can’t find the remote.

But, despite my laziness, I still want all the benefits that come with having my finances sorted.

Luckily for me – and for anyone else who thinks that the three steps to the TV may as well be three hundred – there are products out there that will put in the hard work for you while you reap the financial benefits.

Here are five products that are pioneering the lazy revolution for your money.

1.  Splitr

My friends and I love meeting for dinner and drinking too much wine (or maybe that’s just me?), but none of us love splitting the bill. After all that wine, calculating who owes what is not at the top of our skillset.

This is where you can use Splitr. Download the app, take a photo of the receipt and it will automatically calculate the total. You can then add friends to split the bill using their phone numbers or Facebook accounts.

Note the wine.

It automatically splits the bill evenly but you can drag and drop items to customise everyone’s totals, for example, if one person didn’t have any wine (probably not me). Once you’re happy with the numbers, confirm it and everyone will receive the details for how they can pay.

So, as you can see, there’s no reason why you have to associate finances with effort. Find a product that works with you to help get your money sorted.

2. Acorns

If you want to earn more than just the interest rate your savings account is offering, check out Acorns. This is a micro-investment app that rounds up your debit or credit card transactions to the nearest dollar and invests them. So, if you spend $3.50 on coffee, the remaining $0.50 will be invested.

All you have to do is set your preferences, such as how risky you want the investments to be, and you can become somewhat of an investor pretty quickly. You can also deposit lump sums to give your investment balance a boost.

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3. GROW Super

Superannuation tends to be something that you don’t really think about until it might be too late. Stats have shown that women in particular need to start thinking about their super balances sooner rather than later.

GROW Super offers a few innovative features, including allowing you to invest in industries that matter to you, such as sustainable investments. However, the feature that is perfect for the lazy among us is the automatic round-ups. Think Acorns but for your super balance, with your spare change going towards your retirement fund. You can then use the app to see how you’re tracking.

4. Bill Butler

Paying your bills late (even utility bills if they’re over $150) can damage your credit score, so it’s important to stay on top of them. This is where Bill Butler comes in.

This service acts like a “financial butler”, handling your bill and debt payments for you. You’ll never have to worry about whether you have the money to pay a bill again. You can also receive cash flow forecasting to help better manage your finances.

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5. easyshare

If you live in a sharehouse you will know that managing rent, household bills and shared expenses can be tricky. Even if you open a joint bank account you’ll still have to keep track of deposits and transactions.

Enter easyshare, which does this all for you. Just open an account, invite your housemates to join and tell easyshare how the rent is split. You can select to pay with bank transfers or credit cards and easyshare will collect the total and then pay it for you. You can also use it to split expenses.

Elizabeth is the personal loans editor at finder.com.au. She has a passion for smart spending, saving and investing and enjoys reading PDSes so that you don’t have to.