A Review of RocketMoney - Formerly Truebill (Spending, Saving, and Automation App)

Treyton

March 7, 2022

In July 2022, Truebill was rebranded as RocketMoney. The app functionality has stayed the same, but the color palette has changed and the screenshots below feature Truebill's old branding

Most budgeting & spending apps feel clunky and struggle to accurately categorize transactions.

Personally, I'd given up on them - until I stumbled across Truebill.

Truebill is a multi-purpose financial app that provides spending insights, savings automation, bill negotiation, subscription cancelling, and more.

They were acquired by Rocket Companies in December 2021 for almost $1.3 billion. From a user's perspective, this has definitely been a good thing as the app has undergone several upgrades in recent months.

While they do offer a free version, I find that when I pay for something, even if it's a small fee, I'm more likely to use it.

I also wanted to get the full experience so I could review it, so I'm currently paying $5/month for Truebill Premium and they offer a "pay what you want" subscription option, ranging from $3-12/month.

Premium features include: Real time account balances, premium chat, cancellations concierge, custom categories, unlimited budgets, smart savings, and more. The subscription automatically renews and can be cancelled at any time.

My Favorite Features

Easily view upcoming recurring expenses

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Easily view upcoming subscriptions so that you can plan ahead and adjust cash flow if necessary
Calendar-view

Alert notification if account balance drops below certain amount

A nice alternative to strict budgeting, the app allows you to set a dollar amount limit on your account so that if it drops below that number, you receive a notification and can transfer funds to avoid overdraft fees if necessary

Month-to-month spending comparisons

You can easily view current month's spending, remaining cash in budget categories, see how much you've earned and spent on bills, and compare income & expenses to previous months

Accurate, customizable spending categories

Truebill has been the best at accurately categorizing transactions and if there are errors, you can easily select the right category and create a rule to avoid future mis-categorization
Can set recurring expenses within budget
Can ignore certain expenses
Can flag transactions as tax-deductible
Can view all transactions with one merchant, broken down month-by-month

Auto-savings

If you don't already have an automated system for your savings, Truebill offers a recurring savings feature that allows you to select your goal(s), dollar amount(s), and when you'd like that money to be transferred to savings on a recurring basis

Can connect investments, savings, cards, checking

View all your spending, savings, and investments in one location. The app uses bank-level 256-bit encryption for data storage and uses Plaid to connect accounts, meaning they never have direct access to your accounts and you can disconnect at any time.

Aside from personal finances, I could see this being used as a secondary cash flow tracker for a small business. You can classify transactions as tax-deductible and it provides a cleaner, more simplified view of metrics than Quickbooks or other accounting softwares, and it has both a mobile and web-based app. Given its simplicity, it can't replace an accounting software, but it could be used in tandem for more convenient financial insights.

Overall, I've never used a better financial app.

Every feature that I've tested has functioned as advertised, though I haven't used the Bill Negotiation and Subscription Cancellation parts yet. I have minimal subscriptions and regularly monitor & cancel where necessary and I'm confident that a majority of my bills can't get lower because I've negotiated a few myself, so that's primarily why I haven't tried them out yet. Here's an explanation on their site about the feature:

Bill Negotiation: Bill negotiation is a very time consuming process and is costly for us to do. As a result, we must charge for it. In order to avoid costing our customers money on an unsuccessful negotiation, we only charge IF a bill negotiation is successful. We charge your choice of a percentage of the first year savings as a success fee - you can choose any amount from 30% to 60% while submitting a negotiation request.

Basically, they receive a portion of the savings that they earn for you. Fair enough. If they're unsuccessful, you don't get charged for it.

If you've tried other spending apps in the past and they didn't work or you'd like an easy place to view important financial insights, I'd recommend using it. Having tried many of the other options out there, Truebill has been the easiest to use and has the best design & user experience.

*no affiliation with Truebill