Need Tips for Stress-Free Holiday Spending? This CEO of an Innovative Super Card Platform Can Help

In a Nutshell: The holidays are a season of giving, but it’s no fun to stretch your dollars beyond the limit. The challenge is creating the maximum amount of happiness with the minimum amount of stress. Sam Miller, CEO of the fast-growing spending and budgeting platform Kasheesh, has thoughts. Kasheesh consolidates your credit, debit, and gift cards into one super card to boost your spending power and flexibility. Take Miller’s recommendations to heart and you’ll stand a better-than-average chance of making it to January with your finances intact and your stress hormones at a manageable level.

If you’re like most people, you want to pack as much living as possible into the holidays. Family, friends, and feasting are hallmarks of celebratory times that help us make lasting memories as we mark the years.

But it can be stressful to face holiday gift-giving and social gatherings when you’re not sure where your money is or where it needs to go.

How we spend doesn’t make it any easier. Our nearly complete transition from a cash-based to a cashless society makes money management harder than ever.

You likely manage multiple credit cards and debit cards and probably have a few gift cards lying around with cash still on them. In fact, today, the average American manages 3.9 cards.

Multiple credit and debit accounts are a bear to handle if you’re trying to manage your finances responsibly. You have to gain a global understanding of the rates, terms, balances, and utilizations on all your cards and allocate your spending to optimize your outcomes.

Piece of cake, right? Or Kasheesh can do it for you.

Kasheesh is a new kind of platform that partners with some of the best-known financial technology firms in the business — names like Plaid and Stripe. Kasheesh lets you do something so simple you may wonder why no one’s thought of it before: manage all your cards as if they were one.

Creating a single “super card” with a view into all your accounts lets you allocate funds strategically. Kasheesh’s AI, Smart Split, can even recommend the best cards to use. CEO Sam Miller told us it’s a game changer for busy households that want the best possible financial outcome for the holidays.

“When you consolidate under one Kasheesh super card, you can afford things in a much more personalized manner,” Miller said. “Our recommendations help you gain more financial flexibility without harming your financial standing.”

The benefits of a high credit score are many, and SmartSplit can be a key to making positive outcomes happen. Among other things, the AI tool looks at the rates and fees on your cards, your balances compared to your limits, and the due dates for all your bills to compute where you need to put your spending.

The great thing is that it doesn’t let you make an avoidable mistake. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, the three major U.S. credit bureaus responsible for calculating credit scores, stipulate creditworthiness benchmarks around many of the items on your credit report.

One is credit utilization, the ratio between your card balances and credit limits. The bureaus consider a utilization rate of below 30% optimal for increasing your credit score. A utilization rate above 60%, on the other hand, constitutes a mark of credit risk and can lower your score significantly.

Smart Split doesn’t let your utilization ratio on any one card top 30%. That way, you’re putting yourself in the best possible position to increase your score.

You can also use gift cards as part of your Kasheesh transactions. Let’s say you’re buying a $50 item and have $3 left on a gift card in Kasheesh. You can use the $3 from your gift card to zero out that card and then split the remaining balance on your debit and credit cards as you see fit.

“Your grandma gives you a $5 gift card every year for your birthday, but there’s nothing you want to buy for $5,” Miller said. “Put the gift card on Kasheesh and use it.”

Miller means what he says. Along with the well-known financial technology firms Plaid and Stripe, Kasheesh partners with Mastercard, a company you may have heard of. Kasheesh’s partnership with Mastercard means you can use your Kasheesh super card almost everywhere.

“Not only can you use Kasheesh online, you can go to millions of brick-and-mortar locations and tap to pay with our Mastercard digital card,” Miller said.

That puts users in a pretty sweet situation come holiday time. Kasheesh’s Smart Split AI tool accomplishes what Miller thinks ought to be consumers’ top goal over the break: control. The app applies discipline to achieve it.

“We don’t let anyone max out their credit cards,” Miller said. “And we don’t allow them to overdraft their checking balance, either.”

It’s a rigorous system. Kasheesh allows a maximum of five cards for each transaction. A transaction shuts down if any one of those cards comes back with insufficient funds or a notification that you’re maxing it out. Kasheesh also doesn’t do partial payments.

It’s all based on what happens during the first few instances of a transaction process. When a consumer taps to pay, a proprietary transaction engine in Kasheesh batch processes all of the cards in the user’s account in under two seconds.

“What we’re doing in those two seconds is pinging your financial institutions to verify those funds exist,” Miller said. “Only after receiving that confirmation do we allow you to go through with the transaction.”

Miller’s next recommendation to gain holiday financial mastery is awareness. Kasheesh places a premium on transparency by giving you a dashboard view of your global account status. It’s a far cry from buy now, pay later services that wall themselves off from each other and may allow users to charge more in a month than they earn.

When consumers link their credit cards to buy now, pay later services, they may effectively stack interest charges until they add up to 70% or more for a loan.

“We didn’t want any form of loan stacking or predatory lending to be a component of Kasheesh — we want to make sure you can pay off your bills as they come through,” Miller said.

That makes Kasheesh perfect for the holidays. Transactions for airfare, lodging, gifts, and all the other accompaniments to consumer holiday celebrations get factored into Kasheesh’s AI-based credit score optimization tool to make your holidays that much more rewarding.

“We provide true flexibility where you’re actually in control of how much you’re putting on your cards for each specific purchase,” Miller said.

During the holidays, it’s all about getting your ducks in a row (and not forgetting the turkey in the oven). But even in the best of times, busy households face the financial challenges of the unexpected.

It adds up. Federal Reserve stats tell us Americans are struggling with more than $1 trillion in collective credit card debt and that the figure keeps going up. A quick web search will reveal many articles describing Americans’ lack of emergency savings.

Today’s uncertain economy, high home prices, and lingering inflation create feelings of uncertainty and pressure. Kasheesh isn’t an antidote to the challenges of today’s economy, but it can take a lot of the stress out of managing them.

The Kasheesh dashboard provides easy-to-digest views of all the cards you link with the service. It reports granular views of per-card transactions with timestamps and all of the details you need to make sure you’re keeping up with your bills.

“You’re able to use it as an element in your holiday spending so you don’t get to January with no idea how you’re going to pay things off,” Miller said.

Then there’s next year. Kasheesh places a premium on education to help users gain better awareness and improve their standing. It doesn’t assume busy single moms have the time to scour sites like this one for tips.

And it doesn’t wait until you’ve made a mistake to tell you what you did wrong. Instead, it pops in through Kasheeh’s AI awareness to educate during the transaction. Combine that with the online resources in the Kasheesh Finance Academy and you’ve got a one-stop shop for financial improvement.

Meanwhile, Kasheesh builds lasting customer trust through ultra-reliable and secure technology and second-to-none customer support. It’s an app that looks like it’s here to stay.

“It’s been a fantastic journey not only to see consumers use it but refer it to their friends and family,” Miller said. “That’s when you know you’re onto something.”