OnePay's My Garage tracks what your car is worth, what you owe, insurance offers, and gas savings — all in one place.
Off the top of your head, do you know how much your car is worth? I don’t.
I know roughly what I pay for insurance per month and how much I shell out for gas these days (an arm and a leg). But ask me what my car is worth or how much of my net worth is sitting in the driveway, and I have zero clue.
Apparently, I’m not alone. For many of us, the car is one of the most valuable things we own after our house, and one of the things we know the least about financially.
That's the gap OnePay built My Garage to fix. The free feature rolls out inside the Walmart-backed fintech app today. The company gave USA Today an exclusive test ride just
ahead of its launch.
What I like most up front is that there’s no separate download, nothing that takes you an hour of time and a day's worth of frustration to figure out. You just enter the year, make, model, trim, and mileage, and it builds your auto profile from there.
"There isn’t one place to do all of the things financially focused around your car," Pat McLoughlin, OnePay's GM of Marketplace and the executive behind My Garage, told me. "You can go to Carvana to track its value. You can go to your loan servicer to track your loan. You can go to Progressive to shop insurance. Now there’s this central place, because the car is such a big financial piece of your life."
What does My Garage actually show you?
The main screen shows exactly what I need at a glance: What my car is worth, what I still owe, and how long until it's paid off.
In the example OnePay shared, a Mazda CX-5 was worth up to $24,500, with $7,150 left on the loan and 18 months to go. Do the subtraction, and roughly $17,350 of that car actually belongs to you.
One thing to watch: "worth up to" is the top of J.D. Power's range, not the middle. The full spread hides behind a small info icon, which means the first number you see every time you open the app is the most optimistic one.
That second number is worth a second glance too. If you enroll in OnePay's free credit monitoring, the app can find an auto loan on your credit report, connect it to the right car, and update the balance as you pay it down. You don't have to keep entering new numbers yourself.
That matters because many people have no idea whether they're above water until they're standing in a dealership. If your car is worth $18,000 and you still owe $23,000, My Garage makes that $5,000 hole pretty hard to miss.
That’s not a fluke either. Edmunds says nearly 30% of trade-ins toward new cars were underwater in the second quarter, with people owing an average of almost $7,000 more than their cars were worth. Buyers who rolled that old debt into a new-car loan are projected to pay $16,270 in interest over the life of it — nearly $6,500 more than the average new-car buyer.
Scroll down, and you also get a map of gas offers near you at participating stations. Elsewhere in My Garage, you can shop car insurance, and if you switch through OnePay, the app keeps your new policy information and renewal date connected to the car. EV owners still get the valuation, loan, and insurance features, but there's no equivalent charging-rewards map yet.
I also like one more practical touch here. You can set a savings goal for upcoming car expenses, so that you can start putting money aside for new tires, brakes, or whatever bill you know is coming next.
Can My Garage actually save you money?
Yes, in a few different ways, starting with a potentially better insurance bill.
"If you switch through our compare feature, on average you save just about $1,000," McLoughlin told me.
That could add up to real savings, but there's an important catch. The figure only counts people who found a cheaper policy and switched, leaving out everyone who shopped around and discovered they already had the better deal.
That might be me. My family has had USAA since the dawn of time, though my grad-school-aged daughter keeps asking me whether some newer insurance company could save us money. (Because she’s smart like that…) My Garage gives us an easy way to check, versus continuing to wonder.
If you do switch through OnePay, the app saves the new policy information and renewal date, then prompts you to shop again when renewal rolls around. It can't automatically see the insurance you already have when you first set up My Garage.
"We don't know your insurance when you open your garage," McLoughlin said. "We just don't have that data about you."
Gas savings are smaller, but potentially steadier. During a live demo, one station showed about 46 cents a gallon back, and the company runs a weekly promotion it calls Dollar Wednesdays that pushes the number higher. Those offers vary by location, though, so I wouldn't build a household budget around any one advertised number.
What's the catch?
For starters, My Garage gives you an estimated vehicle value, not an actual offer to buy your car. McLoughlin says OnePay eventually wants to work with companies like CarMax or Carvana so you can turn that valuation into a real offer, but that doesn't exist yet.
OnePay also plans to add refinance recommendations when it thinks you could lower your monthly bills. The company says checking those rates won't affect your credit score, but actually refinancing will. And it's worth remembering that OnePay has a reason to build this beyond doing us a favor.
"We view it more as a value-add than a huge revenue driver," OnePay Chief Commercial Officer Thomas Hoare told me. The company wants to become one of the few financial apps people keep using instead of bouncing among a banking app, a loan servicer, an insurance company and a car-value site.
To his credit, Hoare drew a clear line between this and the free car tools that make their money selling your attention. "We have approached the garage not from the vantage point of advertising, but from the vantage point of ownership," he said.
For me, that’s worth quite a bit. It took my husband and me almost two hours to look all this up last weekend. I’d much rather have it all at my fingertips than walk into a dealership and find out from someone who hopes I haven't checked.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist and on-air contributor for "The Today Show.” The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Contact her via Techish.com or @JennJolly on Instagram.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is your car underwater? This new app tracks your auto finances in one place
