How A Simple Text Message System Is Helping Latino Immigrants Save Serious Cash

Saving money is hard for most people. But when you’re making a pittance to begin with, it’s easy to believe that there’s nothing to put away in the first place.
It's the situation a group of first-generation immigrants working as janitors at Stanford University found themselves in. So they joined forces with graduate students as part of a class at the d.school and came up with a budget-by-text system that is helping people in their same financial bracket tuck away thousands of dollars a year.

Juntos Finanzas, a new service geared specifically toward first-generation Latino immigrants, works a little like Mint, a little like Weight Watchers. Users log all their expenses by text message (since they tend not to have computers), and at the end of the month, Juntos sends them a paper chart, by mail, showing where all their money went. That simple act, Juntos cofounder Ben Knelman tells Fast Company, has had a profound effect. In a six-month test, participants, who earn less than $40,000 a year, managed to save an average of $1,400.