I had a great winter break. I spent time with my family, gave and received awesome presents with loved ones and caught up with some of my best friends. In catching up with my friends from high school, my pal Greg, who attends the University of Miami (yes, that Miami) told me about the best app on the market right now.
Venmo.
What is Venmo? Venmo is an app that gives you a fun, easy way to pay your friends money you owe them. Let us say you go to Howl, you get to the door, you are about to pay the $10 cover charge, and you realize you only have a five and two singles. Instead of being that obnoxious person who holds up the line trying to bargain, making everybody wait out in the cold for that much longer, you can have your friend pay for you. No problem, you will get him 10 bucks tomorrow.
With Venmo, you do not have to wait until tomorrow; you do not even need cash. The way the app works is you hook up your bank account/debit card with the app when you sign up. Then, you select your friend (who must also have the app) and put in the amount you would like to send him or her. The money goes directly from your bank account to his or her Venmo account. Yes, you have to put in your bank information, but no, it will not charge you. It is a completely free app.
When a bunch of friends have and use the app, it works perfectly. Ever spot a friend some money and then never see that money again? With Venmo, you can make him pay on the spot, and there is no excuse for him to avoid paying. Once you have money on your Venmo account, you can “cash out” and all that money goes directly into your bank account. It is a cash-free, college student-friendly way to pay your friends. Simply put, there is no reason not to have this app. It is much better than getting up and walking all the way to the ATM, and it is a safe way to transfer money without having to use cash.
Along with being a very practical app, Venmo also has a nice social aspect as well. Whenever you make a payment to a friend, you have the option to write a description of what the payment was for. Knowing the things we college students pay our friends for, you can imagine how fun writing up a description for those items can be. Then, like Facebook or Twitter, when you open up your Venmo, you get a newsfeed-like screen of all the payments your friends have made and received on the app. You can see what they paid for and got paid for, but not how much, thus protecting your privacy. It is definitely fun waking up Sunday morning and reading what everybody paid for the night prior.
New Year’s Eve my friends and I went into the city and took a rather expensive cab back to my apartment here in the Bronx. Now, instead of dealing with three intoxicated individuals fumbling around with the $35 and change we owed the driver, I simply used my debit card. The next morning, I let my friends know they owed me for the cab, and before I knew it, I had about $20 in my Venmo account, money that, with one press of a button, was back in my bank account 12 hours after the cab ride. It was a convenient and painless way to get the money my friends owed me.
Fordham, we need Venmo to become a thing here. Download it, have your friends download it, tell them to tell their friends to download it. My stubborn roommates keep holding out, but if everybody at school does it, they will not be able to avoid Venmo much longer, and we will all be much happier because of it. It is not going to steal all your money. It is safe, it is free and it is seriously the most useful app I have downloaded since Snapchat.
Venmo, people, Venmo.
