3 ms·

Show HN: Qoins – Pay off debt with spare change

14 points by natwash2 10y ago

natwash2 10y ago
Hey there everyone, my name is Nate and I'm one of the founders of Qoins. (Pronounced "coins".) One issue that's always at the back of my mind is the amount of debt that I have to pay back. Between student loans, a car loan and credit cards, it sometimes feels like I'll never get everything paid off. We built Qoins to tackle this problem. Think of us like Acorns or Digit, but for paying off debt. We round up spare change from your everyday transactions and apply them directly towards paying off your debt. For example, buying a $5.35 sandwich will send $0.65 towards paying off student loans, credit cards, and more! By using Qoins and having additional payments go out every month, you can become debt-free months or years early! We support Instant Verfication for the top US banks, and we'll have access to thousands more banks within the next month or two. Please feel free to ask any questions or offer any feedback that you might have!
- estraschnov 10y ago
  Congrats!
  - natwash2 10y ago
    Thank you!
fizzbatter 10y ago
This is cool! I wonder what the math on payments looks like for this, my immediate fear is that it's contribution is so small as to almost be not worth the signup. Perhaps put a little simple math showing how this would affect a loan? By comparison, i've been using Simple to force myself to feel "broke" constantly. I move the majority of my money out of "Safe to Spend" via large goals which daily suck money away. I tend to only have a couple hundred in my "Safe to Spend" pile, and even that is tiny because each day it has to clear the Goal withdraw. If anything, it's mildly stress inducing, but it is apparently very effective mentally for me. Now, i know the two are very different (both in concept and quantity of money), i mainly make the comparison because the mass saving method i mentioned above is clear on how it will affect my loans/etc. I have no idea how Qoins would affect my loans/etc. Perhaps i'm a bad audience for this, i don't often make purchases, and therefor i don't often have change floating around. Some rough math for last month means i would be saving somewhere in the range of $5, and for the sake of discussion, $60/y. It would likely be more impressive if i spent a lot, "wasted" a lot of money, bought a lot of coffees/etc. In theory, the worse a person is at saving, the more they would save with Qoins. Perhaps that should be advertised in the video? Anyway, a lot of rambling that are vaguely resembling thoughts (i blame 4am, bad sleep and only half a cup of morning coffee), hope something meaningful can be taken from it. Congrats on the launch!
- natwash2 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Adding some simple math to show the benefits is a great idea. We're still gathering some data from our current users, so we'll be sure to add that once we have all of the data to show. Definitely agree that if you typically spend very little with your card, rounding up your transactions will have a smaller effect. We do have an option that allows you to instead specify exactly how much money to contribute each week. We have quite a few users taking advantage of that. Right now they're typically contributing around $20 per week, or $80-100 per month.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
I know some banks have a similar program, where they'll round up each purchase and put it in a savings account. Some of them(Bank of America's Keep The Change program?) will even match a portion of it, so it's a small amount of free money. I've always thought they were a bit silly. Why wouldn't you just save $X thousand and then use any excess income to pay down the loan with the highest interest rate?
- natwash2 10y ago
  Definitely agree that moving the money into savings may not make the most sense. Unless the interest you earn in savings out-paces the interest you're paying on the loan, paying off the loan is always better. That's why we want to solve this problem. The longer that people wait to pay extra money towards loans, the more interest they pay.

14 points by natwash2 10y ago

Hey there everyone, my name is Nate and I'm one of the founders of Qoins. (Pronounced "coins".) One issue that's always at the back of my mind is the amount of debt that I have to pay back. Between student loans, a car loan and credit cards, it sometimes feels like I'll never get everything paid off. We built Qoins to tackle this problem. Think of us like Acorns or Digit, but for paying off debt. We round up spare change from your everyday transactions and apply them directly towards paying off your debt. For example, buying a $5.35 sandwich will send $0.65 towards paying off student loans, credit cards, and more! By using Qoins and having additional payments go out every month, you can become debt-free months or years early! We support Instant Verfication for the top US banks, and we'll have access to thousands more banks within the next month or two. Please feel free to ask any questions or offer any feedback that you might have!

estraschnov 10y ago
Congrats!
- natwash2 10y ago
  Thank you!

fizzbatter 10y ago

This is cool! I wonder what the math on payments looks like for this, my immediate fear is that it's contribution is so small as to almost be not worth the signup. Perhaps put a little simple math showing how this would affect a loan? By comparison, i've been using Simple to force myself to feel "broke" constantly. I move the majority of my money out of "Safe to Spend" via large goals which daily suck money away. I tend to only have a couple hundred in my "Safe to Spend" pile, and even that is tiny because each day it has to clear the Goal withdraw. If anything, it's mildly stress inducing, but it is apparently very effective mentally for me. Now, i know the two are very different (both in concept and quantity of money), i mainly make the comparison because the mass saving method i mentioned above is clear on how it will affect my loans/etc. I have no idea how Qoins would affect my loans/etc. Perhaps i'm a bad audience for this, i don't often make purchases, and therefor i don't often have change floating around. Some rough math for last month means i would be saving somewhere in the range of $5, and for the sake of discussion, $60/y. It would likely be more impressive if i spent a lot, "wasted" a lot of money, bought a lot of coffees/etc. In theory, the worse a person is at saving, the more they would save with Qoins. Perhaps that should be advertised in the video? Anyway, a lot of rambling that are vaguely resembling thoughts (i blame 4am, bad sleep and only half a cup of morning coffee), hope something meaningful can be taken from it. Congrats on the launch!

natwash2 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Adding some simple math to show the benefits is a great idea. We're still gathering some data from our current users, so we'll be sure to add that once we have all of the data to show. Definitely agree that if you typically spend very little with your card, rounding up your transactions will have a smaller effect. We do have an option that allows you to instead specify exactly how much money to contribute each week. We have quite a few users taking advantage of that. Right now they're typically contributing around $20 per week, or $80-100 per month.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

I know some banks have a similar program, where they'll round up each purchase and put it in a savings account. Some of them(Bank of America's Keep The Change program?) will even match a portion of it, so it's a small amount of free money. I've always thought they were a bit silly. Why wouldn't you just save $X thousand and then use any excess income to pay down the loan with the highest interest rate?

natwash2 10y ago
Definitely agree that moving the money into savings may not make the most sense. Unless the interest you earn in savings out-paces the interest you're paying on the loan, paying off the loan is always better. That's why we want to solve this problem. The longer that people wait to pay extra money towards loans, the more interest they pay.