[makebelieve]

A money manager. It knows all the expenses and allocates an allowance. it tells you to get a new job and to trim expenses in a sensible way. it tells you to stop buying so many clothes/books/whatever. it asks you to repeat what you are doing when you don't spend money. it makes you justify expenses before you can have money. it saves for you.

I think this is possible now, when it was impossible before. it funds a debit card monthly for you, and calculates everything else. it learns you finances and then plans accordingly. most people will adapt to whatever money they have, they just suck at managing it. there isn't anyone that tells you "you can't afford that." or "you will run out of money if your lunches are so expensive" "your rent is too much money, get a better job" "you are not saving enough, what can you change so I can save you more money?" that would make life SO much easier.

[herbst]

I like the idea but doubt that would work out, at least not in my environment. I think this can only work if you use your credit card everywhere and always, else you would have to write down your expenses yourself and we know nobody would do that.

Then a lot of payments show up as rather generic. You would need to map a lot of "Payment Messages" to a topic, again something i think i would not do.

I think i could see that working rather in a Bitcoin only environment than anywhere else.

But then again, there apparently are americans who use their credit cards all the time and for everything. This might be just a american thing i cant understand.

[mbrock]

There are Europeans who use credit or debit cards for everything, too. There are also several budget managers based on that being the case.

Tink is a Swedish one that I've used and it works well. It uses some Bayesian classifier or whatever to map payment codes to specific vendors, and to assign categories to vendors. When you login, it might say "we're uncertain about these 7 transactions, please classify them." In exchange for this very small amount of work, you get pie charts and trends and whatnot to visualize your spending habits.

When I first tried it years ago I immediately started baking my own bread and making my own hummus every day to cut down on lunch spending.

There are many consumer vendors in Sweden that don't even accept cash. Most bank offices don't handle any cash whatsoever.