A personal finance expert saw her friends leaving 'tens of thousands' on the table with money mistakes — but it wasn't their $5-a-day coffees

• Young professionals lose money by keeping savings in low-interest accounts, says Yuval Shuminer.
• Shuminer, CEO of Piere, says daily purchases, like coffees, aren't the problem.
• Piere aims to automate financial optimization by finding the best deals.

Young professionals are leaving thousands of dollars of their hard-earned money on the table, a personal finance expert says.

But, she said, their money mistakes have nothing to do with their daily purchases.

As a New Yorker, Yuval Shuminer, the founder and CEO of the fintech app Piere, was used to expensive coffees and brunches.

"It is an absurdly expensive city," Shuminer told Business Insider. "As you go about day-to-day life, you start to rack up a lot of these expenses across coffee that costs $7, an avocado toast that costs $12."

But in 2022, when the economy started to turn, Shuminer saw some of her friends get laid off and look at their finances more critically.

"The conclusion that we came to is that we're taking so much brainpower to think about the $5 that we spend on coffee every day," Shuminer said. "It is so constricting to our lives."

Young professionals do make a lot of financial missteps. But the biggest one is holding their savings — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars — in accounts with 0.02% interest when market rates for high-yield savings accounts were more like 4.5%, said Shuminer.

"That alone is $10,000 they're leaving on the table," Shuminer said.

Shuminer, who studied behavioral economics, launched Piere in December 2023 in response to what she saw. She thought traditional budgeting apps focused too much on constraining spending rather than automating financial optimization. She realized that so many people weren't aware of how much money they could easily put in their pockets while instead focusing on these $5 purchases that shape their lifestyle.

"Instead of working with all these tools that focus on constraining people's budgets and limiting the amount that you're spending on these fun things, the way that we built Pierre is to say, those things are fine," Shuminer said. "But if you're leaving your money in savings without earning yield on it, or you're paying fees that you shouldn't be paying, those are the things that aren't OK."

Piere's ethos is to make your money work for you in the background, Shuminer said.

Most of Piere's users are lower or middle class, Shuminer said, who didn't necessarily learn early on how to manage money.

"Consumers are just so overwhelmed with the financial choices that they have to make that oftentimes they just don't do them," Shuminer said. "Because of inertia, because of anxiety, because of the frictions that they need to overcome in order to make some of these decisions."

She said Piere does the hard work for them, keeping track of the financial marketplace, which changes daily.

"Every single day, something is changing," Shuminer said, such as a new savings account with a better rate.

"Money is a tool — you're not collecting money just to collect money," she added. "You're collecting money for it to create more value in your life so that you can allocate it to the things that are going to make you happier or better off."

Shuminer said the biggest financial oversight she sees people in their 20s making is not realizing the impact that even small investments can make.

"$10 a month, $100 a month, has a lot of compounding effect," she said, which can turn into a healthy savings pot by age 40, and certainly by 70.

"It's like it's some hidden secret that I think a lot of people realize when it's a little bit too late," Shuminer said. "Our goal is to help people."