apps

How I Earn Rewards Points on My Everyday Purchases

Do you ever look at your credit card statement and laugh at how often you spend money at the same four or five places? I definitely do. I have my favorite spots that are part of my daily routine and I'm always trying to think of ways to make my money go further, but I'm not willing to give up those purchases that are a normal part of my week. So rather than skip my morning coffee to save a buck, I use Drop.

Drop is an app that lets you earn points when you shop at your favorite stores. All you have to do is link your credit or debit card. Once you sync with Drop, you then select your five favorite stores. Then, any time you use your card at one of those five stores, you earn points that can be redeemed in the form of gift cards. It's literally that simple.

For me, there were almost too many options to choose from when selecting my five stores. There was Dunkin' Donuts, which was a no brainer since I need my coffee every day. Then there was Uber, which I always end up taking even when it's not in my budget. And of course I had to include Seamless, because I'm never in the mood to cook when I get home from work. To round it out, I chose Chipotle, my go-to lunch spot, and Target, which is where I go for everything else.

All I had to do to start earning points was go about my normal life and I saw the points start to roll in with each purchase. I knew I was spending a good amount of money at those five stores, but I had no idea how easy it would be to start getting rewards points. And if I want to earn even more points, Drop is constantly sending me additional offers from other brands that I love, like BirchBox and Boxed.com, so I don't just have to rely on my five main stores. Since I started with Drop two months ago, I've already used 10,000 points to get a $10 gift card at Amazon. It's that easy!

With Drop, I see all the deals available to me in the app and I can keep track of them in one convenient location. I've been trying to tell as many of my friends as possible to try Drop because there's zero downside and it takes almost no effort at all to earn points. I can't imagine I'll ever stop using it. It's literally the easiest way I've ever earned rewards points. I even get offers for new deals to earn more points at other places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Since signing up with Drop, I know I'm getting getting the best bang for my buck.

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Mac apps to boost the productivity of your home or remote office

Photo: Domenico Loia

By Tom Twardzik

Sometimes, the difference between a successful day of work and a frustrating one is a set of efficient, uncomplicated tools. For someone working from home or otherwise away from the office, the primary tool set is often a computer. A standard word processor, a default email client and the desktop sticky notes might be enough to complete your tasks, but a more personalized and powerful desktop will boost your productivity and overhaul your creative process. The Mac apps below highlight the best ways to upgrade your tool set for a more efficient home or remote office.

Basic productivity

What are some of the most basic actions you perform on your computer? Copy-and-paste and resizing and arranging windows. Saving a fraction of a second every time you perform these actions adds up quickly, and several apps will help you do that.

Magnet.

Magnet has been at the top of the paid apps chart for months. This $0.99 utility gives your desktop more than a dozen shortcuts for resizing and arranging the windows on your screen. Whether you're on an 11" laptop or a 27" iMac, Magnet snaps any window into size and position with a number of keyboard shortcuts. It makes decluttering your digital workspace much simpler than decluttering your desk will ever be.

iPaste is another must-have utility that lives in the background and automatically stores your recent clipboard. It saves what you ask it to save and makes it available in a pop-up menu through a keyboard shortcut. And it does it for free. So you can copy three separate sentences of an article and paste them separately instead of flipping back and forth between windows, copying and pasting three times.

It's the little things.

Idea-sketching and planning

There are hundreds of brainstorming, note-taking and to-do list apps available on and off the app store, but there are few standouts who do it all in one. Fed up with Evernote's subscription model but still willing to pay? Try Notability, the Mac version of iPad's ultimate idea space. Type, draw, annotate, record audio, add photos and PDFs—it does everything. For $10 and no subscription, it'll quickly replace all of Evernote's functionalities.

OneNote

Or, for a free alternative, go for Microsoft's OneNote. The only catch here is that you'll have to create a (free) Microsoft account. OneNote offers a toolset similar to Notability (if a bit less polished and more… Microsoft). It offers a powerful notation space, especially for anyone already in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Agenda.

For a more structured planning app, Agenda is a great alternative to Trello. It's a date-focused notes/journal combination that incorporates your calendar to offer a to-do list, note space and calendar on one screen. Seeing previously completed to-dos and past dates in the same line as future events is surprisingly helpful. It adds temporal context to every glance at your upcoming tasks and notes. $25 gets you all of the synching and exporting features not included in the free app.

Maybe you're looking for a pure, simple, full-featured, free to-do list to replace Todoist, Things or any of the other paid or subscription-based apps out there. Enter Wunderlist. Not only does it offer all of the features of the others for free (including sync, subtasks and an Apple Watch app), but it has collaboration features, too. Use it to manage all of your own projects or set up your coworkers or family with access to shared lists to split up the workload.

Collaboration

Notion.

Speaking of collaborating, you might be searching for a change in routine to boost creativity or energize your team. A new app could be the solution, a replacement for Slack or Trello or Google Drive. Try Notion. It's a free, universal notes/to-dos/wiki app that works on desktop, mobile or in-browser on any computer. You can work offline, sync between devices, invite your team to workspaces and collaborate in real time. It looks great, too. There is a paid pro tier that removes limits on card numbers and upload sizes, but the free version has plenty of features for a small team.

Email

Collaborating with a small team is easy with an app like Notion, but email still dominates working from home or out of office. It's often a necessary drudge, but make it easier on yourself with Spark. This free email app from Readdle offers features like email snooze, send scheduling, swipe shortcuts, pinned messages, tons of smart folder options and more, all with the goal of reaching Inbox Zero. Spark wants to change your habits from leaving thousands of old, unread messages in your inbox to archiving or deleting those messages and leaving only the messages you need in your inbox or in a folder. The snooze feature, alone, makes it worth downloading.

The work

All of these time-saving productivity apps lead to one thing: the work. Two app highlights are worth mentioning: Be Focused and iA Writer.

Be Focused.

Be Focused is a tiny timer app that lives in the menu bar as a stopwatch icon. Set the timer and ��click start, and the app simply counts down. It doesn't block social media or lock you into a writing screen like other apps. It is not a restriction or a monitor, but a reminder to break up your work into blocks and take short breaks in between those blocks. You'll see that this psychological trick helps quite a bit.

iA Writer.

iA Writer is an essential tool for anyone whose work involves a significant amount of writing. It presents a beautiful, simple, powerful, Markdown-compatible writing space and brags a feature called "Focus Mode." When you enable it, this mode dims all of the text that is not the current sentence (or paragraph, or whatever you choose) so that your eyes remain on the current thought. It drives the work forward by avoiding the editing-while-writing quicksand. iA Writer can also highlight syntax in different colors, revealing your love of adverbs or repetitive verb use. And it has "Night Mode," a white-on-black theme that saves the eyes during late-night projects.

In the end, the work is up to you. But you can help yourself finish projects more quickly and efficiently with the help of the apps above.

Tom Twardzik is a writer covering personal finance, productivity and investing for Paypath. He also contributes pop culture reviews for Popdust and travel writing for The Journiest. Read more on his website and follow him on Twitter.

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5 Investing Apps to Get Your Bank Account in Action

Curious about investing, financial literacy, and getting your bank account popping? Has the language, the entry barrier, and the giant heap of information you need to learn to be successful discouraged you from taking that first step? It's a universal problem actually, with more than a quarter of the population having admitted that missing just one paycheck has sent them into dire financial straits. So some brilliant minds have worked to solve that by developing apps that help us overcome our human inertia and make saving and investing a really fun adventure. Here are 5 apps that will help you get your bank account in action.

Stash

Stash is cool because they present you with the tools and options to build a portfolio based on your lifestyle and values. Free for the first 3 months, and then just $1 per month after, you can start investing for as little as $5. Stash also provides simple savings and investing tips to help you develop smarter financial habits. Set your funds on auto-pilot and watch your stash pile up.

Acorns

An app that makes investing for us common folk effortless, I'm personally fond of Acorns. Acorns syncs with your with your bank account and credit cards, rounds up the spare change from your purchases and invests it, and you watch as your piggy bank grows

Betterment

Many of the reviews of this app are from more seasoned investors who say Betterment makes investing easier and allows you to see all your account balances in one central location. Betterment provides a range of different account types that you can customize, tailored for optimal returns. Betterment boasts tax-efficient rebalancing, automatic dividend reinvesting and automatic deposits. Betterments mission is to help people better manage, protect, and grow their wealth.

Robinhood

An outlawing the investing world, much like its namesake, Robinhood provides free stock trading on a slick platform tailored for smartphones and smartwatches. While this app is still too new to have any reviews in the app store, it is an Apple Design Winner, and a critical darling. With no minimum balance required it's a great way for beginners to bend the learning curve, and an awesome tool in the back pocket of the savvy vet.

Of course, if you're looking for something with a lot more zing, you might want to check out a membership to Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS, which provides you with real-time trades. For more on that, click here.

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The Top 5 Business Trends for 2017

From Pokémon Go To Donald Trump, very little of 2016 felt predictable. Yet, even in that chaos, there were still trends --while companies, politics and pop stars change with the wind, trends remain eternal, twisting effervescently in the breeze.

Here's a solid five predictions for what's going to be big, trendwise, in 2017!

1. Brick and Mortars (or anything) that offer something!

Amazon didn't kill main street, despite still doing its best to thin it out. Borders went ages ago and Barnes & Noble is soon about to politely bow out, wine and dining-options be damned. But it's not just books that are suffering: Target's seen some serious losses this year and there were even whispers, earlier this year, that the behemoth that practically invented the contemporary big-box experience, Walmart, might have already seen its best days. What's surviving: Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, the corner indie bookstore. Why?

The other day, working a holiday shift at a nameless big-box store, an old woman asked me what I could recommend as a gift for her teenage daughter. Perhaps she spotted my hip and generational cool. Regardless, I told her to get herself to an Urban Outfitters and listen to what they told her. From music streaming services to direct retail, the one word that everyone is yelling in this age of information-overload is curation. Stitch Fix, for instance, gets it: it's a service that will literally put an outfit together based on the algorithms that you represent and sell it to you. Now that's cash: Stitch Fix brought in $250 million of revenue last year. Invest in places that are offering something you can't get on Amazon; in 2017 they're going to soar.

2. Pot!

Will 2017 be the year Mary Jane becomes Everyday Jane? Forbes seems to think so, with Debra Borchardt, the magazine's self-described "retail and cannabis" expert, predicting, among other things, that the popular drug will inspire at least one network television show and at least one major league sports team to come behind the popular drug in the coming year. Personally, my money is on NASCAR. But maybe Lou Williams will be the one sporting a spliff, since Adam Bierman, of the cannabis investment firm MadMen, predicts that LA will become the "the marijuana capital of the world." Bierman estimates that LA's medicinal cannabis market is already worth somewhere near $1 billion and with California, having passed Proposition 64, legalizing recreational use of weed, back in November, expect that green to flow.

3. Apps!

Apps, apps and more apps! Remember when the coolest thing was to be investing money in somebody's idea for an app, finding the engineers in Belarus, and pouring champagne over your empire in the morning? Come 2017, it will be the most profitable thing: "Even Your Grandma Will Use Grubhub," is Fortune's line on the matter and they're not just talking about the single-tap food delivery empire whose active user base grew by 19% in 2016. Fortune also predicts that Slack, the workplace chat app that slipped into 2016 and replaced every workplace conversation ever, will get a major purchase offer by one of the big tech giants. It's time for all those smart investments to make some serious bank.

4. Investing young!

Among many other things, 2016 will also be remembered as the year that the millennials took over, literally. A few months back, Pew Research confirmed this: "Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation's largest living generation," per the latest census data. Ian Altman, among the old people of Forbes, knows what this means: "Just like past generations, millennials will emerge as the next set of managers and executives." What will this mean, besides giving any spare cash you have to the nearest person younger than you? Businesses associated with the aged will be in or are already in decline: health care, car sales. Where's the money: ZipCar, Uber (see: apps!) and companies with young leadership--like Stefan Larsson, of Ralph Lauren, who's barely in his forties, or even someone like Sean Kelly, 29, who founded a brand of vending machines that specialized in health products or Aaron Bell, who started out as a developer for Microsoft at the age of 15 and now runs an advertisement retargeting software company that's worth over $34 million. Keep an eye out for them.

5. VR!

Just this November, Sony's Playstation launched its first VR interface to massive success, followed quickly by Google's Daydream View which is set to generate millions for their parent company in 2017. But even before those platforms took command of the zeitgeist, the absurd and sudden popularity of a game like Pokemon Go showed how much interest there was in using something as basic as an app to augment everyday reality into a social and capitalizable experience. And Google's quick foray into the field suggests that VR developers have goals greater than video games. Daryl Plummer, Chief of Research at Gartner, a technology research company, goes long: "by 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality," he told Forbes. What's in store for the year ahead? Plummer predicts that at least one global brand will be using some augmented reality platform for sales by the end of the year. They will probably deserve your money.

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