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Empathize — Manage your credit cards & loans in 1 place
Empathize.com lets you create a plan for getting out of debt, and pay all your cards & loans in one screen. You'll know which cards to pay off first to save money, as well as the exact date you'll be at $0 debt!
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@furqanr Thanks Furqan!
1) We're accessing interest rates from Plaid, though Plaid only has interest rate data if the credit card provider provides it. For cards that don't provide it, we'll soon be able to calculate it based on how much interest you were actually charged (reverse engineer it basically.)
2) Fees - We built this DB ourselves. One of our team members looked up all the CC fees, and we pull from that DB.
3) Roadmap - Next on the roadmap is the ability to plan payments across all your cards, and have that execute automatically.
Seeing products like Empathize is so refreshing. So much of SV is focused on building solutions for the SV bubble.
Student loans are one of the biggest problems impacting every day Americans. Considering 40M+ Americans are still trapped in their student loans, I hope way more engineers take it upon themselves to tackle parts of this problem. Empathize is a great start.
Where do y’all plan on going from here?
@davefontenot - We're going to focus on making our existing features really good, then focus on growth + getting feedback from users. One commonly requested feature is the "one master payment", where we just pay the users' bills for them across all their cards. That will take a good while to implement.
Good lord why didn't this exist when I was in my 20s 🙏🙏🙏 amazing (and why does Mint still not do this?!)
@thetylerhayes Thanks Tyler! :D
Not sure why Mint doesn't do it. They've slowed their development a lot since Intuit acquired them. Or perhaps we just have different target markets.
@lucy_guo Thank you Lucy! Really appreciate your support :)
Current alternatives:
- Mint.com
- Personal Capital
- You Need a Budget
The main thing that's different is that nobody's really focused on the high debt market. Mint doesn't show you APR, or let you make payments. Personal Capital is focused on high networth individuals. We're focused on the other end of the spectrum, which is currently underserved.
This looks really cool!
Curious, do you guys support student loans? What if I have 5 student loans, but they're consolidated direct loans - how would that work?
@quinnzeda We do support student loans! If you have consolidated loans, each consolidated loan will show up as a separate loan in our system. For example, if you have 3 consolidated loans, you'll see 3 loans, but you won't see the sub-loans that were originally inside that loan.
I think the name says it all. The video was great and very informative, and the mission/purpose solves a real need. Very cool.
This is so so needed - it's awesome to see this solving a real problem in the world. Such a intuitive, easy to navigate interface too!
Wow, I wish I had access to Empathize when I was paying off student loan debt, instead of blindly calculating what to pay off when. This tool seems to bring a lot of clarity to a situation which can otherwise feel daunting and shameful.
@anna_van_tuinen Thanks Anna! :) When I had a bunch of debt, I mostly just buried my head in the sand. It took a lot of spreadsheeting to understand what was going on with my finances. Glad you like the idea!
Hi PH,
It's Derek & Eric here, founders of Empathize.com.
*** STORY ***
A few years ago, I had $50,000+ in credit card debt and 9 credit cards. I was logging into 9 websites to make payments, and had no plan for getting out of debt.
I had no idea what the interest rate was on any of my cards, and felt completely under water.
We built Empathize.com to solve this.
*** HOW IT WORKS ***
Empathize helps you create an easy-to-follow plan for getting to $0 debt. It shows you the APR on each card, and shows you which cards to pay off first to save money.
You can then pay all your cards & loans in one central place. No more logging into 5+ different accounts.
*** GETTING STARTED ***
1) Go to Empathize.com, and connect your accounts.
2) Use the planner tool to figure out a "get out of debt" plan.
3) Use payments tool to make payments on any credit card or loan.
4) Use the money management tools to keep tabs on your money.
*** Questions? ***
We'll be on PH answering questions all day & all week. If you have any questions, just let us know!
Best,
Derek
And how will the debt relief plan in your app help me? So you think that to get rid of debts I need to spend all my money from my bank account? LOL. I think it doesn't work that way. The plan for getting rid of debts should rather consist of the right investment of funds, which can bring me more benefits. For example, I can invest in stocks, cryptocurrencies, or real estate. Now investing in real estate seems the most reliable way to make money. I talked to a specialist from Mortgage Broker Manchester. He'll help me take out two houses on a mortgage. I'll be able to put people there who will pay monthly rent. This startup is a convenient way to make money, I think.
?makers cool concept, would be even more enticing for people to pay for your product if you incorporated 0% APR offers or resources on how to best use them. I have heard of people who had success dealing with credit card debt by rolling balances between low or 0 interest offers, if you could get that working that would save people tons and more than justify the expense of your recurring cost
@jay_rosenkrantz Thanks Jay! If you give it a try, let me know how you like it :)
Looks useful. I like the idea of all cards on one page, but TBH still paying them off separately doesn't seem optimal since I personally still need to do the math on which ones to tackle first. I'd need either:
1) one button to pay suggested cards first w/ however much I'm willing to pay off that month
2) a consolidation account where you just take over my many accounts and I just pay into one
Do you have either of these, or plan to build it?
@erikdoingthings - Thanks for asking!
1) We're working on this. Currently, you can make a plan in one screen, and make payments in another screen. They will soon be linked, so you can plan all at once and pay all at once.
2) We may do this in the future; it's a lot of credit risk to take on though. In other words, if a customer has $80,000 in CC debt, we'd take on that risk if we consolidated it. I think there's some way we can do it without taking on that much risk; we'll have to look into it more.
@erikdoingthings @derekpankaew Even just allowing us to connect our bank and put our plan on autopilot would be nice! Here's the flow I want:
1. Connect my cards/loans
2. Connect my bank account
3. Commit to $X per month
4. Empathize figures out how to split that $X across my accounts (and notifies me if $X is too small to hit the minimum payments for all accounts)
5. Empathize uses my bank info to make the payment for me, automatically
Is this the plan?
@erikdoingthings @techwraith Yep, that's the plan! There will be some edge cases we'd have to account for.
For example, let's say you spend an extra $500 this month on credit cards. Would you want to pay an extra $500, so your balance is going down at the same rate each month? Or would you want that extra $500 to stay on the card, and just continue paying the same amount each month?
There's a lot of little questions like this that we'd have to answer before implementing this feature. It's on the roadmap though :) we just need to figure out exactly how to implement it.
@derekpankaew Makes sense! For what it's worth, I'd suggest that anything above planned should go to the card that will charge you the most interest (in real $, not %) if you don't (not necessarily the highest interest card!).
Your front page is a bit misleading saying you support Capital One, which you clearly don't if you use Plaid to connect accounts. It'd probably be a good idea taking that off your front page until you can actually support their bank, or add a feature for manual accounts.
@macjabeth Thank you for the feedback! Good point, we will remove Capital One from the home page, as Plaid is currently trying to support Capital One but not yet able to.
@arturmkrtchyan Not yet unfortunately. US only for now. We're aiming for EU in 18 months, but at the moment are just doing US.
@eric_j1 Thanks Eric! Automatic payments are on the roadmap, but are not working yet. At the moment, you can pay your cards from the dashboard, but we don't have a "total monthly budget" feature yet. It's in the works though!
Awesome work @derekpankaew and @ericlafleche and congrats on the launch! Have thoroughly enjoyed being an early adopter of Empathize 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Looks rather interesting. I think it will be great to see all the information about your credit cards and loans in one place. Especially it's suitable for loans. Personally I sometimes take loans, and when I need one, I go to the site https://smslansnabb.se/advisa-lo... to read more information about loan providers and pick the best offer.
@0xrudra Hi Rahul! Most of our data is currently stored by our banking partners, like Plaid. We'll be starting pen testing in the near future.
@derekpankaew I believe I found some issue and would like to share it with you. Do you have any channel of communication for such conversation?
@hatchexa We're using Google Analytics + Amplitude. Alpodo looks interesting, but it looks like a pretty new product. And GA's free, so :P
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