Clarity Money Personal Finance Tools Review

Breadth of Services

The centerpiece of the Clarity Money application is its high-yield savings account, which is held by Marcus. The company’s website states that by saving through the app, you can earn four times the national average on your savings as compared with all other savings accounts. The posted rate on the date of this review was 0.80%. Given the economic uncertainty wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, saving for an emergency is foremost in many people’s minds. The Marcus high yield savings account is a great place to stash your emergency cash because it combines full liquidity with a relatively high interest rate, no minimum balance requirement, and an initial deposit of just one dollar. 

Screenshot from claritymoney.com, August 2020

Clarity Money serves as a financial hub for users. By linking your various bank and credit accounts to the app—including utilities, insurance bills, mortgages, and more—Clarity Money makes it easy to pay bills and otherwise move money where you need it to be. Transfers between financial institutions are quick and painless with the app. You can also set up automatic transfers into your Marcus savings account using the app to speed you along towards your savings goals.

Clarity Money can help users set up and adhere to a customized budget. You can set individual spending limits for various expense categories and the app will let you know periodically how you are tracking against the goals you set. 

Clarity Money scans your accounts to look for recurring payments you may not even be aware you’re making—subscriptions you signed up for years ago and forgot, for example—and calls them to your attention. If you wish to cancel an account, the app can do that for you in a few days’ time. In an age where many of us pay for news access from various publications, as well as hotspots, VPNs, and multiple music streaming services, it’s hard to remember what all is floating around in our finances. The monthly cost of a single unused subscription may be small, but these charges can amount to a tidy sum in aggregate. On various consumer review sites, Clarity Money users praised this recurring payment feature and reported rapid savings upon signing up for an account. 

Since having strong credit is an important element of overall financial health, the Clarity Money app incorporates a credit watch feature. If you’re accustomed to checking your credit score regularly through a separate app, having credit monitoring built into your overall personal finance app is pretty handy. At the very least, it’s one less username and password to remember. 

Pricing

Using nearly all features of the Clarity Money app is free. There is one exception. When Clarity Money recognizes a fee that you’ve may have been charged mistakenly, you can engage the app to dispute the charge. Marcus/Clarity Money takes a one-third commission of whatever amount they are able to recover for you. You always have the option of pursuing a refund on your own steam, of course.

Educational Materials

The Clarity Money website offers a substantial library of educational articles to help users acquire the financial knowledge they need to meet such goals as setting and sticking to budget, getting out of debt, improving their credit score, and paying less in taxes. The articles are nicely organized into conceptual buckets which, in some cases, correlate to using some of the app’s features. We thought that was a helpful, practical approach. Users will find information on such topics as saving for college, estate planning, managing flexible spending accounts, and more among the resources Clarity Money provides. Articles are written in an approachable tone, which we also appreciated. 

Customer Experience

In terms of capabilities, Clarity Money falls somewhere in the middle of the sophistication scale among personal finance apps. It offers many of the services users need to take better control of their finances, including automated savings assistance through its high-yield savings account, a comprehensive budgeting structure, spending tracking, and credit monitoring. You can link a wide range of accounts to the app and thereby access a detailed picture of your finances at any given moment in time. However, you can’t actually pay your bills through the app and it is not an investment app. The app does make it possible to invest through Acorns, another personal finance app we have reviewed, but on its own, Clarity Money can’t facilitate investing or help you track your investments. But if you don’t have any investment accounts or have separate means of tracking the ones you do have, Clarity Money can be a great tool. It rates high on the user-friendly scale with an intuitive interface and attractive, easy-to-understand graphic components supporting its features. 

Clarity Money protects the security of your personal and account information with multi-factor authentication, SSL encryption, the use of firewalls, and other safeguards. All transactions are subject to encryption, as well.

Clarity Money’s privacy policy does not appear to be quite as protective as the policies put forth by some personal finance apps. There is no clear statement in the policy that the company will not sell your personal information, for example. The policy does explicitly state the company shares your information with advertising networks and social media companies in the course of doing business with you and that it may choose to use your information to market third-party products the company believes might be of interest to you. Some users might be perfectly okay with that, but you may want to take that into consideration before signing up for the app and sharing your personal data.

Reputation

Clarity Money earns an A+ rating from the BBB. The app is not yet rated on Trust Pilot. 

It earns a 4.7 out of 5 rating from the Apple App store and a 3.9 out of 5 rating on Google Play.

Both Android and iOS users seem to love the intuitive organization of features and graphic presentation of information. Difficulty logging in and account update lag are two recurring complaints, but the company is diligent about responding to comments. 

Clarity Money Summed Up

For customers seeking a solid savings account, budgeting discipline, and opportunities to reduce their expenses, Clarity Money is a resource they can rely on. Even on its own, the education the company provides is worth the price of admission, which is precisely zero.