Automatic Weekend or Travel Spending Summary – e.g. On the weekend you spent $471. 71% was on food and drinks.
Bill checker – review of regular charges for services and subscriptions
Pro-active alerts for a regular, upcoming bill when there isn’t enough cash in your account– e.g. Your Spark phone bill is due in a few days, but it looks like you don’t have enough to cover it in the account set. – Auto transfer from Holidays – Auto transfer from Saving
Budgeting Assistant - e.g. "You set a drinks budget of $40 per week. There’s about $4 left before you go over. Do you want help adjusting this budget? – Yeah, – Nah – Remind me later
Clarifying expense classification, e.g. You just spent $7.50 at Jack’s. What was this for? – Coffee, drinks, other… – I’ll do this later.
Understanding how we spend, what we spend it on, would really help. Classifying spending, and simple reports to display spending habits would be great.
To anyone: Any thoughts to what you think would help you make behavioural changes to stick to a budget? e.g. reminders? Self-imposed lockouts, maybe with a passcode unlock failsafe. Or do you think insightful reporting that tells you in plain language where your money goes would be more helpful? Or maybe there’s a solution here using AI to help set simple goals to gamify meeting your budget? Thoughts?
Make savings goals easy and attractive eg send a push notification to celebrate when a goal is achieved. Even if its too celebrate the small wins if regularly savings.
This might seem a little childish, but I know I feel good about achieving a goal if it’s made into a game - perhaps if you deposit X into your savings account per week you get to choose a reward or unlock a certain perk?
Link reward programs together, and use for paying bills, such as power or Internet. Plus if they reward programs partner with us, they must shorten a reward in redemption times, as current periods for redemption a too long, and you have to spend a lot to get anything.
Depending on whos payment rails you’re going through you could have an accountability partner who needs to approve a transaction before it completed in real time. If merchants are known either by name or category this could be set by the user. The partner would have to be another Debut member.
Having upcoming payments and an ‘available to spend’ view like UP bank has in AU is something I have really missed since returning. Being able to mark a transaction as regular and be able to view how much of a shortfall there will be by the time its expected to come out is a gamechanger.
If Sheds/Buckets are something that you end up doing one thing is being able to allocate reoccurring transactions to come or be covered automatically by that bucket. That way money can stay in interest bearing accounts as long as possible without needing to move money around manually.
Im not sure you could get away with a chatbot style thing without it being considered financial advice. Would be interesting to know what the regulations are in NZ around general vs personal advice in this space.
