Empathize
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Derek Pankaew

Empathize - Manage your credit cards & loans in 1 place

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Listening.io
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Empathize.com lets you create a plan for getting out of debt, and pay all your cards & loans in one screen. You'll know which cards to pay off first to save money, as well as the exact date you'll be at $0 debt!

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Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
Hi PH, It's Derek & Eric here, founders of Empathize.com. *** STORY *** A few years ago, I had $50,000+ in credit card debt and 9 credit cards. I was logging into 9 websites to make payments, and had no plan for getting out of debt. I had no idea what the interest rate was on any of my cards, and felt completely under water. We built Empathize.com to solve this. *** HOW IT WORKS *** Empathize helps you create an easy-to-follow plan for getting to $0 debt. It shows you the APR on each card, and shows you which cards to pay off first to save money. You can then pay all your cards & loans in one central place. No more logging into 5+ different accounts. *** GETTING STARTED *** 1) Go to Empathize.com, and connect your accounts. 2) Use the planner tool to figure out a "get out of debt" plan. 3) Use payments tool to make payments on any credit card or loan. 4) Use the money management tools to keep tabs on your money. *** Questions? *** We'll be on PH answering questions all day & all week. If you have any questions, just let us know! Best, Derek
Mike Ritchie
SeekWell
@derekpankaew How do you make money?
Ilse Hurtis
And how will the debt relief plan in your app help me? So you think that to get rid of debts I need to spend all my money from my bank account? LOL. I think it doesn't work that way. The plan for getting rid of debts should rather consist of the right investment of funds, which can bring me more benefits. For example, I can invest in stocks, cryptocurrencies, or real estate. Now investing in real estate seems the most reliable way to make money. I talked to a specialist from Mortgage Broker Manchester. He'll help me take out two houses on a mortgage. I'll be able to put people there who will pay monthly rent. This startup is a convenient way to make money, I think.
Erik Dunteman
Shoot YOUR Shot - AI Edition
Looks useful. I like the idea of all cards on one page, but TBH still paying them off separately doesn't seem optimal since I personally still need to do the math on which ones to tackle first. I'd need either: 1) one button to pay suggested cards first w/ however much I'm willing to pay off that month 2) a consolidation account where you just take over my many accounts and I just pay into one Do you have either of these, or plan to build it?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@erikdoingthings - Thanks for asking! 1) We're working on this. Currently, you can make a plan in one screen, and make payments in another screen. They will soon be linked, so you can plan all at once and pay all at once. 2) We may do this in the future; it's a lot of credit risk to take on though. In other words, if a customer has $80,000 in CC debt, we'd take on that risk if we consolidated it. I think there's some way we can do it without taking on that much risk; we'll have to look into it more.
Daniel Erickson
Viable
@erikdoingthings @derekpankaew Even just allowing us to connect our bank and put our plan on autopilot would be nice! Here's the flow I want: 1. Connect my cards/loans 2. Connect my bank account 3. Commit to $X per month 4. Empathize figures out how to split that $X across my accounts (and notifies me if $X is too small to hit the minimum payments for all accounts) 5. Empathize uses my bank info to make the payment for me, automatically Is this the plan?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@erikdoingthings @techwraith Yep, that's the plan! There will be some edge cases we'd have to account for. For example, let's say you spend an extra $500 this month on credit cards. Would you want to pay an extra $500, so your balance is going down at the same rate each month? Or would you want that extra $500 to stay on the card, and just continue paying the same amount each month? There's a lot of little questions like this that we'd have to answer before implementing this feature. It's on the roadmap though :) we just need to figure out exactly how to implement it.
Daniel Erickson
Viable
@derekpankaew Makes sense! For what it's worth, I'd suggest that anything above planned should go to the card that will charge you the most interest (in real $, not %) if you don't (not necessarily the highest interest card!).
Tyler Hayes
Where can I find an iPhone 7?
Good lord why didn't this exist when I was in my 20s 🙏🙏🙏 amazing (and why does Mint still not do this?!)
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@thetylerhayes Thanks Tyler! :D Not sure why Mint doesn't do it. They've slowed their development a lot since Intuit acquired them. Or perhaps we just have different target markets.
Rudra
Nice product! Do you store data locally? What about the security aspects? Do you have a regular pentesting for your platform?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@0xrudra Hi Rahul! Most of our data is currently stored by our banking partners, like Plaid. We'll be starting pen testing in the near future.
Rudra
@derekpankaew I believe I found some issue and would like to share it with you. Do you have any channel of communication for such conversation?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@0xrudra Hi Rahul! Can you send me an email at derek@empathize.com?
Travis Bellington
The application seems to be wonderful! However, how do you plan to handle all the private user data? What types of information would you have to store?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@travis_bellington - Most of the data is stored by our banking partners, like Plaid. So at this time very little of it is stored in our servers. All the account balances, transactions, etc are currently stored by Plaid. If in the future we need to store more data, it'll be heavily encrypted and carefully secured by something like Hashicorp Vault (or similar).
Quinn Zeda
This looks really cool! Curious, do you guys support student loans? What if I have 5 student loans, but they're consolidated direct loans - how would that work?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@quinnzeda We do support student loans! If you have consolidated loans, each consolidated loan will show up as a separate loan in our system. For example, if you have 3 consolidated loans, you'll see 3 loans, but you won't see the sub-loans that were originally inside that loan.
Furqan Rydhan
This would have been super useful in my 20s, would have been great to save a couple years of anguish. The high interest cards really get you and it's hard to get out of the trap. If you're not doing all the math on which card to pay first, it's really easy to fall behind! I saw you're using plaid for the bank data, how are you accessing the CC info (interest rates, fees) or do you have a database of the most popular ones? What's next on the roadmap, where do you see it expanding to?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@furqanr Thanks Furqan! 1) We're accessing interest rates from Plaid, though Plaid only has interest rate data if the credit card provider provides it. For cards that don't provide it, we'll soon be able to calculate it based on how much interest you were actually charged (reverse engineer it basically.) 2) Fees - We built this DB ourselves. One of our team members looked up all the CC fees, and we pull from that DB. 3) Roadmap - Next on the roadmap is the ability to plan payments across all your cards, and have that execute automatically.
Artur Mkrtchyan
Softr
Nice product! Does it work for EU accounts too ?
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@arturmkrtchyan Not yet unfortunately. US only for now. We're aiming for EU in 18 months, but at the moment are just doing US.
Artur Mkrtchyan
Softr
Jonathan Picazo
Your front page is a bit misleading saying you support Capital One, which you clearly don't if you use Plaid to connect accounts. It'd probably be a good idea taking that off your front page until you can actually support their bank, or add a feature for manual accounts.
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@macjabeth Thank you for the feedback! Good point, we will remove Capital One from the home page, as Plaid is currently trying to support Capital One but not yet able to.
Sudeep Chauhan
Air of Time
Wow looks elegant and useful. UI seems to be better than Mint to me. Congrats on the launch
Derek Pankaew
Listening.io
Maker
@sudeep_chauhan Thanks Sudeep! :)
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