Are you into the idea of investing? Do you wish that saving money and building on your savings was easier? If so, then this app might âinterestâ you quite a bit (pun not intended⊠but it worked anyway!)! But can you really make money with the Clink app? We downloaded it and decided to give it a try.
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Making Money With The Clink App
To get started, letâs talk about the idea behind Clink.
Clink is an investing app thatâs available as a free download on the Google Play Store. To date, it has been downloaded over 10 thousand times, has a 3.7 star rating, and has been reviewed by over 230 people.
Hereâs a quote from the Read Me section of the Google Play store that does a good job of describing exactly what the app does.
âClink is an investing application which facilitates your savings by making you save every time you go out.â
Clink basically takes money from your bank account and invests it for you into a diversified ETF portfolio. Here, the money can grow without you needing to worry about it or hassle with it.
So, in short, this is a handy, easy-to-use investing app (at least, thatâs what itâs supposed to be).
But does it really get the job done where it âcounts?â (Get it? âCountingâ your money? Yeah⊠that one is a stretchâŠ)
Thatâs what we were determined to find out.
Opening Clink On Our Mobile Device
Opening Clink led us to a pretty straightforward log in/sign up page.
They also hosted a video on this page that was designed to show exactly how the app works. The video did a good job of this, and basically demonstrated how Clink allows you to set up a savings/investment schedule thatâs completely tailored to your own personal life.
Whether you want $20 taken out of your account and invested every Tuesday, or 10% added to every burrito purchase and sent to your investment portfolio, Clink has you covered.
But we were still curious about how easy the app is to operate. Obviously, investing is a slow-growth sort of thing, and saving money is a pretty straightforward concept. So what we were really looking for here was an answer to the following question⊠is Clink the app to choose if you want to save money and start investing?
To answer this query, we signed in and got started.
We chose the âSign In With Facebookâ option, as we usually do when it is presented to us. After going through the usual permissions, we were taken to a series of screens that gave us a general, quick overview of how the app worked. The screens basically described the process as follows⊠Register, Schedule, Add Bank.
We clicked ânextâ after going through these screens, and were taken to a screen where we needed to fill in our personal information.
I was then taken to a more in-depth screen that asked me for quite a bit of additional information. Hereâs a look at what it looked like. These screens were pretty easy to fill out, and despite the seemingly complicated array of questions, it barely took a few minutes to get it wrapped up.
But, I would like to point out that this section did require some sensitive information.
Not only do you need to include information about your overall financial situation here (how much you make per year, what your net worth is, etc.),but the app also needs information like your social security number, date of birth, phone number, employer name, etc.
To be fair, this doesnât seem like such an unreasonable array of information to request, seeing as how Clink is an investment app. I tried to skip through it without filling some of this in, but it wasnât possibleâand I canât really say anything negative about it.
This is a financial savings/investment app. And despite this, itâs still pretty quick and easy to fill out.
To put it really simply, you are filling out an investment account when you register for Clink. The app then allows you to choose your savings method.
Basically, you can either link your credit/debit card to the app and send an additional percentage of the money spent on transactions to your investment account, or you can plan on having a certain amount of money deducted from your bank account and invested for you at the given times you choose on your schedule.
Up to this point, it seemed pretty easy to us. The next stage of our research, however, revolved around figuring out exactly how much this app was going to cost to use in the long run.
How Much Does Clink Cost?
Clink is super-transparent about how much their services costâwhich is really cool. They have a flat fee of $1 per month if your account balance is under or equal to $5,000. If you have more than $5,000 in your account, then you get charged annualized fees equal to 0.25%.
So, letâs just say that you had $10,000 in your account at some point. Your yearly fees on such an account would equal $25⊠which is pretty much $2 per month.
This honestly isnât bad at allâthough the fees would get higher as you acquired more money in your account.
But on the flipside, even the higher fees arenât that big of a deal when you take into account everything that Clink does for you.
Plus, all of your money is SPIC insured (up to half a million dollars) when you use Clink, which would certainly provide me with a lot of peace of mind! They also use all of the standard security measures that you would expect any bank to useâsuch as 256 bit encryption and the like.
What Do Other Users Think Of Clink?
Here are some examples of reviews that I found in the Google Play Store for the app. Obviously, the amount of money that you will actually earn in the app is based on how well your portfolio is doing. It is also important to remember that investing in small amounts like this is a lengthy process, and will not get you rich overnight.
So what we are really looking at here is the quality of the app and the service behind it. These are the details that will likely make or break Clink for the majority of users.
Most of the people who had a problem with the app seemed to complain about money being withdrawn from their account without their permission. But some other reviews also said that people who had such complaints just didnât understand how the app worked.
According to these reviews, you need to give the app permission to move funds aroundâso it is possible that some of these people just didnât realize exactly what they were doing when they set up their scheduled withdrawals/investments.
But really, overall, the app seems to do a great job. Itâs quick, efficient, seems to work without glitches or bugs, and seems to make the process of investing super-simple.
More experienced investors might be a little bit perturbed by the simplicity of the process, and may desire more investment options. But new investors or people who wish to âset it and forget itâ will likely find the app, and the service it renders, very desirable.
Is Clink Too âClunky?â
No. Personally, I liked how the app worked. Iâm also a bit of a novice when it comes to investingâso the idea of setting it up and just forgetting about it was really attractive to me.
I am getting to that age where I really need to start thinking about retirement, and apps like this are really starting to get my attention because they are not only cheap to use, but also easy and pretty effective if you want to save money without doing a bunch of extra leg work.
Granted, the app isnât perfect⊠and some people may disagree with how the money is invested or handled. But the ETFs are all managed by Vanguard, who seems to be an industry leader as far as I can tellâso it seems to me that your money would be in good hands with this app.
Will you earn a return on your money? Again, this sort of ties into what I just said about how the money is investedâbut yes, it seems that most people do see a positive return on their investment. Itâs a small gain, because these investments tend not to be high-riskâbut the gains are there.
I liked it. Itâs not for everyone, and itâs important that you understand what you are allowing when you set up your scheduleâbut overall, I think Clink is a pretty well-done piece of software investment machinery!
There are also other similar apps and services that you might consider. Acorns.com is one example. There is also the site Fundrise.com that focuses on crowd-funded real estate investing. Â
Our final Thoughts On Clink
Should you download it onto your phone?
The Clink App Review
Entertainment Value
Income Opportunity
Final Review
Honestly, there are tons of various apps that claim to help you "make money", but really there are two facts to consider. 1) Most of them don't actually work. 2) If you can make money, it's not going be very much. If I'm going to spend any amount of time working online, I want to be working for myself by building my own profitable website
Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
Gloria
I have been waiting three months for money that I am trying to withdraw from my Clink account. It’s just slightly less than $300 and they can’t seem to get me my money. At first they said that my bank was declining the direct deposit’s but they apparentlyâŠat least according to Clink⊠kept repeatedly attempting to deposit into my bank account and my bank kept rejecting the deposits. Once we decided that was the problem they said they were going to send me a check. I’ve had repeated emails and phone conversations with their chat service and with Ben Francke who is the head of this horrible organization. Ben is also the person that I suspect that I am talking to when I chat online with Clink. I am getting the impression that Me. Francke is just running this operation out of his garage or the back bedroom. I am furious at this point. I was very patient with all of the excuses up until now but I keep hearing that the check is in the mail and that I will get it tomorrow or Friday or whenever. Now they are trying to tell me that maybe somebody is taking my mail or that the check was sent to the wrong address and all of the clichĂ© excuses you’ve ever heard. I’ve gone along with this game for three months and now, giving them the benefit of the doubt but now I’m mad. I want my measly $300 and I want it now. Today I emailed and left a phone message them to just wire me the money and now they are not responding to me. I have a feeling I am never going to see this measly $300 that I’ve invested.
Alicia Armideo
Thanks for the warning. I’ll sysy away.
G
Beware, clink is horrible, only 1 person can make ANY changes to your account, Ben. He does not take phone calls and does not return phone calls as previously mentioned by others, online chat support only refers you to Ben, who again doesn’t take phone calls or return messages. FIND ANOTHER SERVICE TO INVEST WITH, DO NOT USE CLINK