This new app uses AI to help you save and invest money

(Pocket-lint) – Saving, whether you’re aiming for a modest or more ambitious total, can be an absolute nightmare to get right without any help, and even if you’re managing to squirrel away a nest egg, you might find yourself wondering if it’s sensible to have that money just sitting somewhere.

Being able to get some help with saving, and being able to easily invest your savings so that you could potentially see some actual growth, is something that loads of us would welcome, and it’s just what Plum offers. It’s an AI helper, packaged up nicely in the form of a simple app, and it’ll let you earn interest on your savings, invest them (capital at risk), and reap the benefits. Here are a few of the benefits Plum can bring to hopeful savers. 

Automated savings

The key to making savings grow, for many people, is to get a “little but often” approach – putting away small amounts regularly so that you don’t feel their loss as keenly. However, that can be hard to stick to and also a fiddly process if you’re doing it manually. 

Plum lets you set up automatic savings that will automatically help you by squirreling away some money algorithmically on a regular basis. This will help you to make proper savings without ever feeling like you’re under real restrictions. Plus, a superb round-up feature can round every card payment you make up to the nearest pound and put the difference into your savings. 

This is another excellent way to make small contributions that don’t feel like much individually, but really do start to add up over time to help you save money. 

Bill switching

Another key way to save money that can again be pretty hard to take action on yourself is your household bills – we all know that switching providers relatively regularly can save us money, but actually getting up the motivation to do so can be a bit of a challenge.

Plum can help with its superb bill-switching service, which can change you from your provider to the most cost-effective alternative, completely automatically. This means you don’t need to worry about taking ages to find the best possible deal for yourself – Plum takes care of the busywork, while you just reap the benefits. 

Interest

Another textbook way to put your money to work, of course, is to ensure that it’s at least earning interest wherever it’s sat. Despite that, many of us probably know we’ve got money sat somewhere gathering digital dust. 

Plum makes sure that you earn between 0.35% and 0.55% AER on your savings, when you move your money into an Easy Access Interest Pocket on the app, depending on your membership plan, which means that at the end of a year you can reflect on growth rather than wasted efforts. 

Interest is calculated every day, then applied to your account monthly – and these interest accounts are provided by Investec Bank, who have the right to change the rate at any time. Best of all, there’s no minimum amount to open an interest-bearing pocket, and money is covered by FSCS up to £85k, if the scheme applies to you.

Invest easily

Of course, if you want to take a more active hand in growing your savings, investment is the answer, and Plum also makes that a simple matter. It can help you to invest as little as £1 in whatever sort of stocks and bonds in the shape of tracker funds you want, and you can make things as simple or as in-depth as you like in your quest for returns. Remember that when you choose to invest your capital is at risk.

You could be the next part-owner of huge companies like Google and Apple, or use your own particular expertise to target areas that you know are in for some expansion. It’s one of the easiest ways to get into investing, almost like an independent investment app or wealth management app, and strips away a bunch of jargon as an added bonus. The cost of investing via Plum is your membership plan fee plus average fund management and provider fees of 0.51% annually.

You can invest on Plum on either the Plus (£1 a month) or Pro (£2.99 a month) plans, but getting interest (0.35% AER) on your savings and automating them is completely free – you can try Plum right now, without having to pay at all! Check out the Plum website to find out more details and download the app for yourself.