''SPENDING PARENTS SPANNERS'' : 2/3

SPENDING is easy. The hard part is keeping track........

Tech We're Using : Has the honor to feature Tara Siegel Bernard, a New York Times journalist. Here, she tells us how she uses technology in her job and in her personal lives.

1.  WHICH basic tools would you recommend for people to increase their savings and investments?

It's not so much a tool but a technology : automation. After you've settled on a low-cost investment  provider such as Vanguard, automation is the surest way to set yourself up for success.

Automate as much as you can - your Roth I.R.A. contributions, your kids 529 college savings accounts.

If you have an employer-provided retirement plan like a 401[K], see if it will allow you to automatically increase the percentage you're saving each year. If not, set a date in you're electronic calendar to remind you to revisit all of those amounts annually.

I also like the little revolution that roboadvisers have started. They lean heavily on technology to help invest and manage your money, though more of them are increasingly integrating human advisers.

Betterment and Wealthfront have free tools that will let you play with various goals and savings amounts to see how long it will take you to save what you need.

2. Outside your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with?

I live a pretty low-tech life. We listen to music through Sonos and watch television through a four-year-old Roku device, though we haven't entirely cut the cord because my husband is a  soccer fan.

I did recently learn that we can hand in our cable box and pay a little less, while keeping access to to cable channels through Roku, though you lose the ability to record.

There are also several apps that I use daily or weekly. I always have roughly five dozen tans on my computer screen, as well as stories I come across on Twitter that I want to read later.

To minimize the clutter, I save everything to the Pocket app. I also keep a to-do list on the  iPhone ''reminders'' app.

I also love Ink and Postgram for turning my children's photos into cards for relatives.

I have a long wish list of apps, but I really want more sophisticated tools that would help us make smarter consumers. i want to enter a product name into an app so it can assure me that we're not feeding our children weed killer in their oatmeal.

The honor and serving of the latest thinking and writing on the Technology the advance world is using, continues.