Keep Your Money | Hacker News Reader

Keep Your Money

medium.com

12 pointsblueyedlion12 comments

I hate to be that guy, but I must admit that there are a couple of things that me put off about this app:

Firstly, I completely disagree with this notion that young adults should be cutting off in coffees and cocktails every so often so that they can buy more expensive stuff in the long run. If incurring in these small expenditures every once in a while derives enough value for you to feel that you are leading a satisfactory lifestyle and as a result make you steer away from the big, impulsive spends (such as cars and headphones), then why not spend the extra dollar on a coffee? Even if you it every single day, at the end of the month you'll only have spent 30$ extra. If you did that every day for 2 years, you'd still only have spent an extra 730$, which is way cheaper than buying a new car. The goal for young adults should be financial independence, not to be able to spend large amounts of money in dispensable goods.

Secondly, I don't see how the fact that the app "doesn’t connect to your bank account or show depressing red info graphics". After putting in so much effort in reducing my spending, why should I have to manually input every dollar I spend into the app?

I see where you are coming from in that young adults should be able to spend money however they choose and if the lifestyle they choose includes coffee every day and cocktails every weekend then that's fine. Financial independence is for sure the number one priority.

However what we were noticing was that many people (young adults in particular) had small hopes and dreams that required some amount of money that they simply didn't have. People wanted cars so they could easily get to a new job, a new musical instrument for their favorite hobby, or to take a trip somewhere they've never had the chance to go before.

It's all about how you want to spend your own money and everyone's priorities are different.

I understand the concept of the app and can definitely see its value. However, I'm not a big of a fan of the way it is described in this blog post.

From my personal experience using mint, I usually find that the big spends are the ones that really cause a dent on my monthly budgets and honestly, from a personal finance point of view, don't see much value in tracking only the small day-to-day savings. It is necessary to have a look at the big picture to contextualize the spending.

I do feel like keep is probably a good tool for staying motivated while budgeting and getting an instant reward for something that usually doesn't give an instant reward, but even so the effort necessary to manually input every single dollar I save into the app just seems like such a commitment. To me, keep would be really helpful as a complement to the services that do connect to my bank account (in my case mint), to help me decide wether I can have the coffee I like such much or if I should stick to the free coffee available in my office.

Sorry to sound cynical, but this just seems like an over-inflated sense of saving that doesn't reflect reality. Sure, I could add in no Starbucks for the week and feel good about it, but then I don't usually have Starbucks anyway. Now, instead of doing something proactive and saving money, I've tricked my mind into believing I am saving money while I am not, thereby hindering any progress towards real goals that need actual savings, not 'mental accounting gimmicks'.

Simple Finance took a different approach -- saving bits away every day, and assuming you wouldn't notice anything but the lower day-to-day balance and could adjust accordingly.

Maybe the right answer here is to couple this app with a bank account -- so that when you say you didn't spend $3 on a coffee today, that the $3 ends up in an earmarked savings account (or at least deducted from the "safe-to-spend" balance) for that special something you're saving up for.

Yeah, an easy way to say "No coffee, I'm saving money" and then immediately save that money would be a killer thing for me. I try to minimize minor purchases when I'm saving for something, but I like to have my money compartmentalized; you put a few bucks in an envelope (or functional equivilant) and then when the envelope is full, you buy whatever you've been saving for. If there was an easy way to reduce the friction of moving the money into the envelope, I'd probably be way into that.

The goal is to one day have this app moving money when you choose not to spend on the small things. That would for sure make the act of "saving" more real. For now we just wanted to test the concept of tracking when you don't spend money instead of when you do spend.

I think this is one danger of an app like this... If I was "considering" making a purchase when is it appropriate to say that I should "save" it and when would I have not purchased it anyway?

Either way, I think it is a tool that can be used for good as long as that assumption is understood upfront.

The right way to have more money is to make more money, not cut out trivial expenses.

That's only partially true, and not really an option for most. Your trivial expenses are related to the amount of money you have. For most, a $3 coffee or $14 cocktail go from trivial to significant very quickly.

If you have 10x that amount of money, then your trivial expenses are also 10x more expensive. It's weekend getaways to Vegas vs a cocktail, $100 steak dinners vs a cup of coffee.

This app looks to try to teach some sort of understanding and self control in spending - which is important no matter how much money you think you have.

Which is not always an option, whereas cutting out expenses, trivial or not is.

You'd be surprised how many people get deep in debt from trivial expenses. It's not like these people didn't want to "make more money".

And what happens when that isn't an option?

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