Your smartphone can help you handle all sorts of emergencies. If you’re having car trouble in the middle of the highway, you can pull out your phone to contact roadside assistance to get you back on the road. If you’ve injured yourself, you can use a First Aid app to figure out how to treat the injury and recover. And, of course, if your First Aid app can’t help you, you can always call 911 and get an ambulance to your location right away.
Your smartphone is the perfect tool for handling emergency expenses, too. Find out exactly how you can use it to cover an urgent payment as soon as possible.
Mobile Banking Apps
Do you have your bank’s app on your phone? If you don’t, you should download it right away. Your mobile banking app will show you exactly how much money you have sitting in your checking and savings accounts. You’ll want to know this information in an emergency. You can confirm how much you have sitting inside of your accounts (including your emergency fund) to see whether you can afford to cover an urgent expense out of pocket or not. Once you confirm the account balances, you can decide your next steps.
If you have enough funds available in one of your accounts, you can pay off the urgent expense through your preferred method. You could do it with your bank card in person, an ATM cash withdrawal or an electronic funds transfer. When it comes to electronic fund transfers, you can choose to arrange for a wire transfer through your banking app or you can use a money-transfer app to send the correct amount over.
If you don’t have the funds available in your accounts, you will have to look into borrowing solutions in order to pay off your emergency expense in a short amount of time.
Money-Transfer Apps
You want to transfer funds electronically to pay for your urgent expense. If you aren’t going to arrange for a wire transfer through your banking app, you can send your payment through a money transfer app, like Venmo, Zelle or PayPal.
Remember that the recipient of your payment will have to have an account for this specific money-transfer app in order to access your urgent payment. Be sure to discuss your methods of sending payments with the intended recipient beforehand.
Credit Card Apps
Maybe you don’t have enough money in your bank account to cover your emergency expense. In that case, you could try to borrow the funds and make repayments afterward. One way to do this is to use your credit card. As long as you have enough available credit on your card, you should be able to charge an emergency expense to it right away and then slowly tackle the balance later on through the routine billing cycle.
Having a credit card app sitting on your smartphone can help you in this scenario. You can use the app to confirm whether you have enough credit available to go through with the charge. You’ll be able to see your balance and know for certain whether making the transaction is a good idea or whether it will push you far too close to the credit limit — or worse, max out your credit card.
Your credit card app could also help you arrange for a different borrowing method: a cash advance. Instead of charging the expense to your credit card, you would be borrowing money from your card’s line of credit and using it like cash. So, you could request this banking option through the app and see whether it goes through.
You should know that cash advances do not have the same grace period that comes with your usual credit card charges. Your loan will collect interest immediately after you’ve borrowed it.
Loans Through the Phone
If you don’t want to use your credit card, don’t worry. You still have borrowing solutions that you can turn to in an emergency. There are different kinds of loans by phone that people can use to cover urgent expenses when they don’t have enough savings available. As long as you meet all of the eligibility requirements, you can submit an application for a loan by phone and shortly learn about your approval status. With an approved loan, you could manage the expense and then follow a repayment plan afterward.
See? Your smartphone can get you through yet another emergency. You can unlock your phone and find the right solution in a matter of minutes.
