Have you ever received a bill in the mail, like your mortgage payment or credit card bill, and wondered if you could get a better deal on your rates? Sure, you could contact a few banks, or review different credit card offers online, but all of that takes time. You may be getting the best deal already, meaning your 30+ minutes of searching for a better rate was just wasted time. What if there was a company that could do all of this searching for you, with just the click of a button?
Cinch Financial is a new website that aims to do all that and more – for free. Also, if you have a mortgage, credit card, insurance, or banking interest rate you think you could get a better deal on, submit that bill to Cinch, and get feedback on how you could do better.
Getting Started with Cinch
Cinch breaks it down for you right in the beginning. Choose a category, from Banking, Credit Cards, Home Insurance, Auto Insurance, or Mortgages, and from there you can decide to go in-depth to learn more, or you can just have Cinch do all the work for you.
If you’re curious about why home insurance is important, or how to get the most from your credit card, you can choose to Learn About those topics. Cinch covers each topic clearly, but not so in-depth that you get bored reading.
Companies cannot pay to be on Cinch, either, making Cinch more unbiased than other sites that take a commission for recommending certain products above other, less expensive products. If you just want to look at the products Cinch recommends, they offer unbiased descriptions of the best credit cards for cash back, travel, and more. While their Auto, Home Insurance, and Mortgage recommendations aren’t up yet, you can check out their banking and credit card reviews for now.
Best Parts of Cinch
The best part of Cinch is the ability to get personalized recommendations based on your habits, plus Cinch’s BillSnap feature. Currently, you’re able to get personalized recommendations on banks and credit cards. Home, Auto Insurance and Mortgages recommendations will be available as Cinch continues to grow, so look for that soon.
Personally, I think I could do better than the bank I currently have, so I used Cinch’s personalized recommendations feature to see if that was true. One of the best features of Cinch is the ability to look for better banks, based on your consumer habits. For example, I use my checking account primarily as an extra account. I make deposits into my bank, but I pay for almost everything with my credit card in order to accumulate travel points.
Using Cinch’s banking recommendation feature, I typed in how much I deposit monthly, how I use the account, and banking features that are important to me, and Cinch provided me a list of banks that I could do better with. This is a useful feature, because Cinch will show you approximately how much you will earn on your account using different banks (online or not).
It doesn’t appear that Cinch has information for all credit unions, so you’d still want to give your local credit union a review. However, if having a local, physical branch isn’t very important to you, Cinch offers several recommendations that could earn you a higher rate than your current bank.
Shrink That Big Bill
One of the other great parts of Cinch is its BillSnap feature. If you have a monthly, recurring “big bill” (mortgage, auto or home insurance, etc.) Cinch offers you the ability to upload your bill for analysis. Cinch will let you know if you can save money on that big bill, whether it’s with a new bank and a lower interest rate, or if it’s with your same provider but with additional discounts.
The best part of Cinch is that all the recommendations and information are free and unbiased. It may not have all banks, but the site is growing and adding more banks, along with more auto insurance and home insurance providers. As with any site recommending financial products, you’ll want to do your own due diligence by reading about a company before signing up with them.
If you’ve ever been curious to see how your bank stacks up against other banks, check out Cinch’s personalized recommendations to see if you can save money. You could be surprised by what’s out there!
Heard of Cinch? Ready to try it out?
-PF Pro
Leave a Reply