Have you ever lent a friend some cash for dinner or booked a hotel for a Spring Break trip and then had to track down your friends to pay you back? Especially during the period of the proofreading session, you urgently need to buy coursework online but you have already spent money on a summer trip and borrowed funds from several friends, and now you do not know how to find them. Of course, you don't refuse loved ones when they ask for anything, but sometimes they start to take advantage of your kindness and understanding. It happens to the best of us and keeping track of who owes you what can sometimes be near impossible. But thanks to modern technology this all just got a lot easier.
Ever heard of Venmo? Venmo is a new app that makes paying and getting paid by your friends a piece of cake. My friends and I used this while traveling abroad where often one person would have to book a hotel room for the whole group and it made reimbursement much less stressful.
But how does this fancy new app work? Well, when you first download the app, you will enter your debit/credit card information so that the app will be linked with your bank account. That way when you need to pay a friend for Spring Break, dinner out, or the snacks she brought back for you from Trader Joe’s all you have to do is select that friend, enter the amount you want to pay them, and the payment is automatically deducted from your bank account. When your friends pay you back, the money will go into your Venmo account. You can then either use this money to pay more friends or “cash out” into your bank account by entering a routing number and account number (found on checks in your check book). And the best part? Venmo doesn’t require you to have the same debit/credit card provider or bank as your friends, letting you pay whoever you want, whenever you want.
Charlotte Schaffer is a current junior at Stanford University and will graduate in 2015 with a B.A. in Economics. On campus she is a member of Stanford Women in Business, Alpha Phi, and 85 broads. She has also participated in Stanford’s Freshmen Council and the Stanford Ceramics Club. After seeing the many difficulties facing women in the working world through Stanford Women in Business, Charlotte has identified that one of the main ways women can begin to take more control of their lives is through financial literacy. DivaCFO’s goal of empowering of women through financial literacy truly excites Charlotte and through her work as an intern she hopes to help women across the globe plan for a more stable and successful future!
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