undefined | Better HN

0 pointsDLarsen12y ago0 comments

I've been taking a similar approach to a side/hobby project that relates to personal spending/budgeting.

I am seeking to apply the "easy data entry" + "subjective good/ok/bad" measures to help folks discover patterns of bad spending decisions. While most every budgeting/spending app will show you "how much you have left" or "safe to spend" the real measure of improvement is whether you made good decisions or bad decisions given your life circumstances. This also has the effect of softening the penalty for missing data. If you miss some data, you just pick up where you left off. You're not trying to balance your budget. You're tracking decisions. Although I'm not (yet) biting off the notion of correlating it with other personal analytics, that's an interesting extension of the idea.

I'm really convinced that a behavioral approach to spending/budgeting would lead to longer lasting positive changes than fretting about exceeding your grocery budget by $19 due to unexpected company joining you for lunch.

The general gist is described here: http://www.spendlight.com/land-3.html

0 comments

jlees12y ago

The issue is that of avoidance. If I have to tell an app I've been bad, I'm more likely to avoid telling it at all. (Like not getting on the scale when one knows the weight won't be good news.)

Sure, highly motivated users will track everything, but it doesn't take much to leave the highly motivated state. There's also the angle that knowing you have to report in with bad news might stop you doing the bad thing in the first place, but when the penalty for not reporting in is nil, it loses some of its power. Perhaps approaches that use human accountability or other reward systems (eg. GymPact) could help here.

DLarsenOP12y ago

Good point. This is absolutely essential.

In some circles I've described it as "a money tracking tool built for couples" and that's true. This all emerged from a chart my wife and I had been using on our fridge. We wanted to address the decision making progress as a couple and not beat ourselves up over specific failures (impulsive spending, false bargains, etc), but try to improve our process for budgeting and spending money.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse