Jun 21, 2020
Revolut (ionize) Your Wallet!
I suppose I belong to the group of first people who opened an account in Revolut not only in Poland but across all Europe. Back then, it was not popular and most people were afraid of using the application thinking that their personal data might be stolen or they would lose the money they have inside of the account. Let’s be honest. I don’t use Revolut for my savings. What I do is I send some amount that I am planning to use during the following month after I receive my salary and the rest I leave in my savings account to receive some amount of interest. Actually this is the only part I don’t like with Revolut that they don’t have a savings account although they have a banking license in Europe and they could definitely give us the luxury to gather all money within one application. You would have even your money under protection up to some amount due to the banking license they have. Except for my savings, all of my transactions are going through Revolut and I am pretty happy till now.
So what are the advantages of Revolut that made me stop using traditional banks for my daily transactions? It is absolutely impossible for me to list all of the advantages within only one post but let’s hope that it will be a great beginning for you to be curious about the possibilities and discover further on your own using the application itself:
- Exchange Rates: I make many international transactions every day. The exchange rates of traditional banks are mostly horrible. First time with Revolut, I had a feeling that I stopped losing money during the transition. Whatever you see on Google for the conversion, you have almost a similar amount charged from your account.
- Accounts in Different Currencies: You can open and disactivate accounts in as many currencies as you want. I have main accounts in PLN, EUR, GBP, and TRY. There are many recurring payments I have in my account from Turkey that normally I would prefer moving to Polish accounts, however, Revolut helped me to keep them in Turkey and even save money for keeping them there. For instance, my google account is mainly from Turkey and the amounts that I need to pay are in TRY. I will give you a comparison of Google One — 100 GB package’s cost. Since I have a Turkish account, I pay annually 57,99 TRY, which corresponds to 34,48 PLN, which means I pay 2,87 PLN per month for 100 GB Google One Subscription. On the other side, the same subscription costs in Poland 89,99 PLN, which makes the monthly cost 7,49 PLN. So this is really huge difference, right? Imagine that you save such an amount from many applications. This was the one example I used to show you how you can actually save using the Revolut. You don’t always need to earn more money to have more money. You need to know exactly how to spend the money. Then your purchase power will automatically increase.
- Disposable Card: This is the part actually for the people, who are afraid that their data or money would be stolen, because of online shopping. Revolut gives you a really good tool to generate a disposable card, which will be destroyed after each use, and you will have a newly generated card number. It comes really handy, for instance, when you want to subscribe to a page, where you have a 1-month trial but you are asked to provide the card number. You are sure that you will forget to cancel this subscription. Believe me that I always do! This is really a great help for such people like me in case we forget to cancel. Since the card will be disposed after only 1 use, Revolut will decline the payment request from the vendor and you will receive a notification in the application. Absolutely I don’t want to motivate you to use this opportunity to subscribe wherever it is possible and not use them, but not always you most probably want to continue your subscription after the trial. Moreover, the disposable card really gives a chance to do shopping on some pages that you normally wouldn’t buy but want to give a try.
- Splitting Bills: When you go out with your friends, I am sure that one of the hardest parts of the outing is the payment after a meal together. If not for you, it is definitely hard for the waiter. He/she needs to calculate every one’s bill one by one and get them individually. I really hate torturing them in this way. Revolut helped me to solve the issue since I can pay for all of the bills from my account and split using only one simple button for each person, who was with me that day, according to the receipt that I received. For the ones that don’t have a Revolut account, you can even send a money request link, which helps them to pay for the bill online and send you money by their card, like they are making online shopping. No one needs to be stressed after the meal to calculate who ate what and how much should pay.
- Analysis of Your Spendings: That is also one of the strongest features of Revolut. The algorithm that they have is really nice since it is possible to analyze your spendings during the month according to categories (Groceries, Entertainment, etc.), or Countries or even Merchants to see where you spent the money mostly during the last month/year or all the time. There are many banks that do it but I haven’t seen such a good way of analysis. In the beginning, I only had one concern about the payments that I do for all people after our meetings and split them since the whole amount was showing up in the report as I ate them all. I raised my concern to them and they actually added a function to exclude single transactions from the history so that this won’t be reflected in your analysis. I was really happy that I saw this implementation. And yes, this is also great with Revolut that you have quick responses from the Customer Service and they care about your feedback about the application.
The only thing that I can complain of right now is that they don’t want us to have access to the account on Web Browser. You can only use the mobile app to manage your account, which is cool for me, but I think it is worth mentioning since this might disturb some of you after a while.
Lastly, please don’t have an idea that I receive any commission from them, because I really don’t. I only have a free Metal Account for 1 year, because I found 5 people to register but that’s it. So please just ignore your feelings that this post is refunded by them. Just to make you feel better I don’t share any links within this post.
In case you still have some fears to open an account in Revolut, I hope I helped you to remove this barrier since I really think that you will only have the use of this application.
Cheers
Ozan Tellioglu
Source: https://www.ozan.pl/blog/post/3
