Keeping up with every aspect of your finances takes effort, which can feel overwhelming for many people. I enjoy checking my financial accounts regularly to track my spending. Unfortunately, it’s easy to overlook subscriptions and recurring expenses. A tool like Trim helps avoid that problem.
If you struggle at tracking your spending, or believe you can save money on your monthly bills, this Ask Trim review shows how the handy app can do a lot of that work for you.
What is Trim?
Think of Trim as a bill negotiation service. The fintech app works in the background, scanning your financial transactions to find ways to save you money.
The app does this in two ways:
- Connecting to your bank accounts to find savings opportunities
- Scanning your emails for receipts for price drop refunds
Sure, you can do this on your own, but it’s easy to overlook due to lack of time. If that describes you, it often leads to overspending, or your finances being off track.
Trim works on your behalf to streamline your finances and lower your monthly bills.
The best part is you can sign up for Trim for free. You simply need to provide an email address, or Facebook account to start. From there, you connect your banking information – the accounts you connect are at your discretion.
The service even allows you to communicate via text or Facebook Messenger.
How Trim Works
Trim’s process is pretty simple. After connecting your accounts, the app analyzes your transaction history. They take a look at your spending to identify potential areas to save money. Those include:
- Cancel unwanted subscriptions
- Negotiate prices on all utilities, including cable and cell phones
- Personalized financial product recommendations
- Analyzing spending patterns to track money habits
This is all something you can do on your own, but many don’t know where to start. Trim simplifies that by doing it for you in the background.
The Ask Trim app currently works with over 15,000 financial institutions, so it’s likely your bank is on their list. Apprehension aside, it’s best to connect all of your accounts so the service can get a complete view of your finances.
Once you connect your accounts, the app looks at the past 90 days of transactions to identify savings opportunities.
Our favorite feature of the app is the ‘Ask Trim’ function. When you select ‘Ask Trim’, it updates you on your spending so you can see how much money you’ve spent throughout the month and where.
That is enlightening information you can use to help improve your finances.
Cancel Unwanted Subscriptions
We all have subscriptions and memberships we spend money on, and it’s easy to overlook their cost. That is sunk money you can use to apply towards other needs or goals.
Canceling needless subscriptions is the first main area Trim works on your behalf.
Upon reviewing your finances, Trim identifies all of your subscriptions and memberships. After finding each one, they provide you a list.
You may be shocked to see how many subscriptions you use each month.
These can be any of the following:
- A membership from a free trial you forgot about using
- A service you no longer use
- A service you use sparingly
Having unwanted subscriptions or memberships happens to the best of us. They may seem like small expenses, but they can add up and keep you from accomplishing goals.
When Trim sends you the list of subscriptions, they ask which ones you want to cancel. You simply reply back “Cancel [insert subscription name], and they cancel it for you.
This is a free service, and you get the savings to apply towards other financial needs.
Negotiate Bills
Do you like to negotiate lower prices for a service? If not, you often overlook significant savings by failing to ask for a lower price. This is where Trim shines and saves significant money.
Trim negotiates prices through their program Trim Bill Negotiator. The service is as straightforward as it sounds. When the app reviews your spending it identifies services to negotiate.
Trim negotiates with a variety of service providers, including:
- AT&T
- Comcast
- Cox
- DIRECTV
- Dish Network
- Sprint
- T-Mobile
- Time Warner
- Verizon
Trim has a 70 percent success rate on negotiating lower prices on bills, including up to 30 percent reduction on cable and internet bills, according to their website.
The Trim app doesn’t work on all service providers, but if you have a cable, cell phone, or internet provider, they negotiate with all major providers.
How Much Does the Trim Bill Negotiator Cost?
The subscription cancellation service is free of charge, but there is a cost to the negotiation service. If the service secures a lower price for a service they take 33 percent of the savings.
For example, if they reduce your DIRECTV bill from $100 to $80 per month, you will save $240 for the year. Trim will keep $79.20 of your savings, so you net $160.80 in savings for the year.
That savings may not be worth it for everyone. If you don’t plan to take the time to do the work, then it’s often going to be worth the cost to claw back some money.
Additional Savings With Ask Trim
Trim not only helps you save on recurring charges and subscriptions, the service also saves money on your everyday shopping.
Let’s say you regularly shop on Amazon like most of us. Have you ever bought something only to see that it has a price reduction a week later?
Amazon used to have a 7-day price guarantee but they don’t offer it any more so you could potentially lose money if you overspend on an item.
Trim watches prices on Amazon and notifies you of price drops. This lets you initiate a price adjustment from Amazon and get some money back.
Speaking of cashback, Trim helps with that as well.
This is huge since most people don’t mind earning money back on regular purchases they need to make.
The most common way to earn cashback is by using credit cards, but it’s no secret that it can be challenging to keep up with your spending that way and if you end up overspending, you’ll have to pay hefty interest charges.
Trim allows you to earn cashback easily without having to feel guilty about overspending or paying hefty interest charges. Trim finds relevant cashback deals for you and activates them for you on your Visa card so all you need to do is spend and save.
You won’t earn a ton of cashback using this feature as they only offer a handful of opportunities each month. However, it’s an effortless way to get rewarded for your regular spending.
Debt Payoff Calculator
This is a newer feature offered by Trim. Paying off debt is a challenge, especially if you have high-interest debt. Through the Debt Payoff Calculator, Trim works to negotiate lower interest rates.
They call each card company and ask for a reduced rate. The service does this every three to six months to continuously reduce your interest rates.
Additionally, Trim creates a personalized debt payoff plan and calculator. Through personalized coaching, they use the plan to help you actively work towards debt freedom.
You can do this on your own, but a plan and guidance are immensely helpful towards killing debt for good.
*Related: Want to cut the cord? Read our guide on the Amazon Fire Stick channels list to see how it can help you save $50+ per month on cable.*
Trim does charge $10 per month for this service, with a 90-day refund if you don’t want to use the service. Minimal cost aside, the help to kill debt is well worth it.
Is Trim Safe and Secure?
Now that I’ve gone over all the cool benefits of the app, it’s time to ask ‘is Trim safe’? That’s a fair question since they have access to your financial information.
In short, Trim uses bank-level security throughout their service.
What does this mean? They use 256-bit SSL encryption, which is standard in the banking industry. Trim does not see your login information when you provide it, they use a system called Plaid (a banking service) to send the information to your bank.
Once connected, the bank sends your transactions in a read-only format.
This allows Trim to view your transactions, but they can’t make any changes to your account. They can’t move money or make any changes within your account.
The app can only see transaction information.
Trim also uses two-factor authentication, so anytime you sign in from a new device they send you a verification code to use. The only way something can happen to your accounts is if someone steals your phone or computer and accesses the information that way.
It’s also important to note that not all services automatically start when you sign up for Trim. They don’t automatically track Amazon purchases, for example.
You have to opt-in for that service.
The same goes with their program to lower your Comcast cable bill or internet fees.
Trim vs. Truebill
Truebill is a service very similar to Trim. Many compare Trim vs. Truebill to see which service is the better money-saving app. Both apps do fairly similar things, such as:
- Negotiate lower prices
- Cancel unused subscriptions
- Offer bank-level security
Truebill adds some features not available with Trim. For example, they offer downtime monitoring to claw back internet costs. Truebill also negotiates with electric companies in certain locations.
Both services charge a portion of the savings as a cost. Truebill charges 40 percent vs. 33 percent at Trim.
*Related: Looking for other ways to save money? Check out our top options to lower your monthly bills and put more funds back into your budget.*
Read our review of Truebill to get a full breakdown of the service. But if you’re searching for an alternative to both Truebill and Trim, take a look at Billshark.
Are There Any Downsides to Trim?
The great thing about Trim is that it provides all of these services for free. The only downside is they collect 33 percent of your estimated annual savings when they successfully negotiate a lower price.
If Trim can find a price adjustment on Amazon for you, they will also take 33 percent of the money back you’d receive, so that is something to consider.
You can avoid this charge by doing the work yourself, but the cost is your time. They also negotiate for a job, so it’s likely to result in increased savings versus your efforts.
Bottom Line
Trim really does act as your personal assistant by taking care of personal finance maintenance tasks we overlook. We all know we should do any of the following:
- Cancel unused subscriptions
- Reduce our spending
- Negotiate lower prices
- Shop around for lower insurance rates
It’s easy to put off doing much of the above. Time gets in the way, or we’re afraid of negotiating. A service like Trim is great because they do all the work for you to help you save money fast.
Much of it is free, and the rest comes at a reasonable cost.
The main thing you should consider is if they are able to generate enough savings to make it worth the cost. If you don’t actively work to get lower prices, it’s highly likely you would benefit from testing out the app.
Have you ever heard of Trim? How many unused subscriptions or memberships do you have? How often do you try to negotiate bills?
