Keep Your Money • Hacker News Board

Re: Keep Your Money

#11

Post by parasitius » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:52 PM UTC

You guys are all wrong because you're ignorant of cascading effects. Read The Millionaire Next Door if you have to, but this does apply all the way down to things like a coffee, and of course you do have to draw the line of being a cheapskate somewhere to keep your insanity.

Case and point my car. Had a fantastic Toyota $8000. Cost me nothing in maintenance and $150/mo car payment. Told myself I am blowing $150/mo on toys why not upgrade to a 286hp high miles Acura (115,000) and really enjoy the driving that I do do instead of puttering around. If I just waste $150 less a month I'll break exactly even. Nope. Didn't work. Cascade effect. Now that I'm psychologically in my dream car, a 'luxury' car, I feel like I need to park in the covered garage, and I feel like it is okay to go to nicer restaurants because my car looks fine in the lot surrounded by other decent cars. Tires? They don't cost 2x as much but 6x as much! Brakes are 4x as much. Car insurance skyrocketed from $36/mo to $56. Oh and I have to use premium gas. This extra $150/mo car payment is the LEAST of the additional expenses the more exciting car cost me.

Same happens when you live in an upscale neighborhood or buy a nice house...it becomes infinitely easier to justify tangential expenses. Read The Millionaire Next Door to understand this effect better.

Re: Keep Your Money

#12

Post by blueyedlion » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

CocaKoala wrote: post #7

cbhl wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) fo…

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 fricti…

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.

Re: Keep Your Money

#13

Post by outericky » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Keep Your Money

#14

Post by pmoorcraft » Tue, Sep 09, 2014, 12:48 AM UTC

blueyedlion wrote: post #10

pmoorcraft wrote: post #4

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 sati…

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…

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.