Qoins Review: Multiple Features to Help You Pay Down Debt

If you're looking for a tool to help you make additional payments on your debt easily, you may have stumbled across Qoins. 

Unlike automated savings apps, Qoins is an automatic debt pay-down app. It automatically rounds up purchases and puts that extra money towards your debt.

Even making small additional payments on your debt can go a long way to reducing interest costs and helping you get out of debt faster.

Read our thoughts in our Qoins review below.

Who Is Qoins?

Qoins (pronounced coins) is a fintech service that uses rounded-up funds to pay off your debt. The CEO is Christian Zimmerman. Qoins (Qoins Technologies, Inc.) was launched in January 2017 and is located in Atlanta, GA.

In 2018, Qoins received just under $1 million in funding (its first round of funding). These funds were used to grow the company’s team and for customer acquisition. Qoins was also part of two accelerator programs: Queen City Fintech and Village Capital Pathways.

“Having graduated 2 years ago, I know the headache and stress credit card and student loans can have on someone. Our mission is to help alleviate that stress and continue helping people pay off their debts faster than ever,” Zimmerman said in a press release.

Qoins does not appear to have a Better Business Bureau profile.

What Do They Offer?

Qoins is considered a prerequisite to similar roundup apps such as Digit and Acorns. Whereas Digit uses rounded-up funds to save and Acorns the same for investing, Qoins uses roundups to pay off debt. It makes sense to pay off debt before saving or investing since debt is actually subtracting from your net worth, unlike saving and investing.

For a small monthly fee, Qoins will round-up your transactions, take the difference, and use it to pay down debt. Qoins does this by connecting to your checking account to scan transactions. Rounded amounts are moved into an FDIC-insured account created by Qoins. Once roundups hit $5, Qoins will withdraw those funds and put them into your debt account. Each month, this money is sent off to pay debt on accounts you’ve designated.

If you’re wondering what exactly a roundup is, it’s the difference between the amount of a transaction and the next whole dollar. For example, if you have a $3.67 transaction, the next whole dollar is $4. The difference between those two amounts is $0.33, which is the roundup. That amount is sent to your debt account once your roundups total $5.

If you happen to have only a few transactions per month, rounding them up will be a slow path to paying down debt. For those cases, Qoins has another option: the Smart-Savings plan. It’s the same fee but sends more per month to the special debt account. Withdrawals are still pulled at $5 increments.

There are three settings in the Smart-Savings plan:

• Least aggressive (level one): $0.50 to $1.50
• Moderately aggressive (level two): $1.50 to $3.00
• Very aggressive (level three): $3.00 to $5.00

You can switch between levels at any time. The above levels are daily amounts. Qoins says that Smart-Savings customers save $20 to $25 more than roundups, which translates into an even faster debt pay-down.

Qoins claims they’ve helped people pay off over $4,500,000 of debt. They also say you’ll pay off debt 10 times faster and improve your credit score while doing it.

Qoins has a mobile app. Everything, including creating an account, is done there.

Are There Any Fees?

Yes — there is a $1.99 monthly fee although your first month is free.

To make the fee worth it, you’ll want to create as small an expense ratio as possible.

Here’s what we mean: Say you send $50 per month to pay down debt. The $1.99 fee is 3.98% of the $50. At $100, the fee is 1.99%. If you are only sending $10 per month toward debt, the fee becomes prohibitive at 19.9%. That’s as much as credit card rates.

The upshot is to make sure you have enough transactions to round up so the service is practical. Otherwise, consider going with the Smart-Savings plan.

How Do I Open an Account?

Visit qoins.io to download their mobile app, which is where you’ll open the account. All of the functionality is handled through the mobile app.

Is My Money Safe?

Yes — Qoins uses 256-bit encryption, which is now standard. Rounded-up funds are deposited into an FDIC-insured account.

Is It Worth It?

Everything that Qoins is doing can be done for free either manually or with services provided by your bank. Most banks now have a service that rounds up your transactions and moves them into a savings account. From there, you can set up payments to go out to your debt accounts.

The advantage Qoins has is the feedback on your debt paydown. You can view a payment history and the total amount of debt you’ve paid off, which can be an inspiration to keep going.

There’s also the added convenience that Qoins is doing all of the rounding up, saving roundups, and sending of debt payments for you. You don’t have to worry about cobbling together multiple services to accomplish this when you use Qoins.