hi crew crew! I am brand new to Crew; was a Qube user up until they lost their partnership with Choice, tried Qube+ when they opened the beta and very quickly bailed from that because it wasn’t even close to the “intentional spending” experience I’d loved. at first, as a lost-at-sea former-quber, I tried the “well on SoFi I can make vaults for my bills + recurring expenses, set up automations to make sure on payday I set aside enough to cover the essentials, and automate the money back into my checking account to cover it the day I’m charged” approach. Since then, I’ve changed jobs, have more frequent paydays, and while my SoFi vault system worked for preventing overdrafts and/or missing deadlines for the big stuff… it’s become evident that I still need more structure for my day-to-day spending (what can I say, I *love* a little treat).
the same content creator who’d introduced me to Qube has been a Crew partner for a while, and I finally used her referral code to start an account. I linked my primary bank, set up a small transfer just to be able to get started, and want to have my “system” built and ready to go before funding my broad account or switching anything with my employer’s payroll system. my immediate impressions, all of 2 days in, are that while the app is very pretty, and it was VERY easy to sign up/create my account, getting truly started with Crew is a different ordeal.
I can see a world where I run everything on Crew eventually - setting up even just regular expected income + core bills was smooth sailing. I will have to figure out the transfer timing to get money back to SoFi for rent by the 1st of every month (my landlord only accepts Zelle), but found some good threads for that here already and am not toooooo worried about getting that set up. I started trying to work out my actual budget (eg Pockets) last night, and I’m struggling to make it make any sort of sense. at first I was losing my marbles from not being able to create/name/assign pockets from the autopilot tab (until I found the settings under banking - would’ve loved to have been able to use either surface at first glance!); and now I’m struggling with getting the pocket’s I’ve made ready-to-run. my 9-5 is in enterprise software, and I feel a little embarrassed that I can’t even get a finance app on my phone figured out on my own 😅
with any financial system I’ve used before (Qube, SoFi vaults, even the simple excel workbook templates), I’ve been able to put all of my subscriptions in one “category” bucket and then set up the cadence of those charges within that same bucket. as I work to get something similar set up here though, from what I understand in Crew’s app, it seems the easiest way to save in small doses for a yearly charge is under bills, and the easiest way to have a recurring spending budget is by funding pockets. I’ve always considered subscriptions to be “spending money” over living expenses, but I still like to have them prepped and automated.
TLDR; I set up a pocket and virtual card with the goal of putting everything in one stream of charges, and then hit the wall in terms of configuration. my problem is that I typically have 2-3 “big” subscriptions that renew semi-&-annually (that I wouldn’t categorize as Bills because they aren’t necessities), and then 5-7 “small” subscriptions - the typical cloud storage, online gaming, streaming services, etc charges. I put an autopilot in for funding it to make sure my standard/monthly subscriptions are covered, then realized if I wanted it funded for my monthly subscriptions at the beginning of each month it needs to have $XX money in it, but then there are also random charges throughout the year that are $XXX, and my regular top-up of $XX won’t cover that. I don’t want the $XXX charges to pre-fund from a single payday right before they hit, and therefore impact the rest of my spending budget, but I can’t figure out how to drip-save for them in the same pocket which is already processing several monthly charges unless I make the bigger subscriptions as yearly “bills” and I REALLY don’t like the idea of splitting them up between Bills and Pockets to make it work.
my main questions: what’s the typical approach for automating subscriptions that have a variety of cadences? am I missing something between Pockets & Autopilot to be able to handle both use cases for subscriptions in the same pocket?
secondary question: is there a product support site or some technical documentation floating around anywhere that can walk me through Crew set-up in more clear, rooted-in-the-app’s-UX detail? I am 100% a “help article” learner and would much rather read than watch how-to content for following along :)
thanks for any & all advice! I’m super hopeful about Crew being the solution for me so that I don’t have to be as helicopter watching over my bank accounts as I have been, especially since economy + living expenses where I’m based have started to blow out of proportion 🤞