Update 12/17/20: Trim has added a savings account that offers 4% APY on balances up to $2,000. Unfortunately you need Trim Premium which costs $99 per year meaning it’s not really worth doing
Trim is a free service which monitors your credit cards and bank accounts to help cut down on unnecessary bills or overpaying.
Overview
To get started with Trim, you’ll have to signup and link all your credit card logins and bank logins so they can see where you spend money. Trim will then help you save money and control your finances in various ways:
- Trim shows you all your active subscriptions (e,g. Netflix) and can even helps you cancel them from within the the login or Facebook Messenger.
- Trim shows all your transactions for the month in one place, similar to Mint. They can also set up notification alerts for any fees or large transactions in your accounts.
- Amazon Price Patrol: You can connect your Amazon login to Trim and they’ll monitor Amazon to see if the price drops on any of your previous purchases. They keep 25% and send you a check for the remaining 75%.
- Trim started an exclusive service to help you save money on your Comcast bill. More on that below.
- Trim started a new card-linked cash back program called Trim Savings. More on that below.
Comcast Savings
Trim now offers an exclusive Comcast cost-cutting service. They’ll monitor your Comcast bill and use chat to get reductions. You pay 25% of the first bill’s reductions, e.g. if they save you $10 per month, you’ll pay $2.50.
I don’t think you need to add any credit card or bank logins to make use of the Comcast feature; there’s a separate tab where you add your Comcast login details.
Card-Link Savings
Trim also launched a card link program as part of Visa Trial Link. By linking your Visa card with Trim, you’ll get targeted cash back offers in the form of a statement credit. Visa cards only. For debit cards, make sure to process the transaction as credit. (Sample terms from Visa.) You can read more about card-link rewards program in this post.
[Related: Complete List of Card-Linked Reward Programs]
You have to enroll each Visa card separately. All card-link offers are managed exclusively via Facebook messenger.
Current Deals – Save up to $30
Here are the current deals that were offered to me when signing up for Trim Savings on 4/24/17. After linking your Visa card, they’re immediately sending out a grocery offer. After activating that offer in Facebook Messenger, they’ll send you two more offers. Here are the three offers:
- Spend $5 or more at any U.S. grocery and get $1 back. Can be repeated up to ten times for a total savings of $10. Expires 7/3/17.
- Spend $5 or more at any U.S. restaurant and get $1 back. Can be repeated up to ten times for a total savings of $10. Expires 7/3/17.
- Spend $20 or more at any U.S. movie theater and get $10 back. Expires 8/31/17.
Final Thoughts
Some people might not be comfortable giving Trim access to all their financial information, despite their security promises. They presumably scape anonymous data from everyone’s purchases history and monetize that way.
Looking past that, Trim’s main service of keeping track of subscriptions could be nice for someone who has many of them and is constantly adjusting and canceling them. Other people have a few steady subscriptions and won’t see any value in that. Beyond that, there isn’t much that I can see in the basic Trim product which Mint doesn’t do better.
To me, the interesting parts of Trim is their Amazon service, Comcast service, and card link offers:
- The Amazon service sounds the same as Paribus which offers such a service (at the same 25% fee) for many merchants, including Amazon.
- The Comcast sounds interesting: you can do it yourself, but it’s probably worth the cost (25% of first bill savings) to have them constantly monitor it for you.
- The card link offers are mildly interesting if they’ll be consistent cash back of many dollars each month without having to think much. We’ll have to see whether they continue to come out with useful offers.
Do you find Trim worthwhile? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
