You sign up with the company. You give them a bunch of different categories of budget, and whether or not its a hard budget that you can't go over or a soft budget that can.
They send you a pack of credit/debit cards highlighting the category. Say a big red "Eating out" card, or a light blue "Groceries" card, etc.
All of these debit your bank account you've linked to the service (a la paypal). On the service you setup "sub accounts" (which I'll hereafter call accounts). These are debited when you use a card, but only up to the amount you've authorized for the month on hard accounts. If you have say "33.49" in luxuries, and you try to charge 36 bucks, it denies it and sends you a text, "You only have 33.49 left in luxuries". If you try to make a charge in a soft account (aka one you're okay going over, but that it takes out of a different budgets, say Groceries will take out of dinning out), the charge will go through, and take any of the excess amount out of the account specified as the overflow.
There would be a webapp and smartphone app that would show all these balances on all these accounts you set up so you could see up to the minute how much was left on the cards.
Basically, 21st century envelope budgeting with no book-keeping once you set the budgets, with cards that work on the web or in restaurants or at any store.
It would be useful to everyone who's bad at balancing checkbooks, or money management in general, from teens to just people who are too busy to really worry about it.
That's cool. Maybe a key idea here is not the different cards but the ability to track certain expenses by delegating categories to certain people. What would happen if any credit/debit card generated a text message when declined?
Comments
Okay, here is one:
You sign up with the company. You give them a bunch of different categories of budget, and whether or not its a hard budget that you can't go over or a soft budget that can.
They send you a pack of credit/debit cards highlighting the category. Say a big red "Eating out" card, or a light blue "Groceries" card, etc.
All of these debit your bank account you've linked to the service (a la paypal). On the service you setup "sub accounts" (which I'll hereafter call accounts). These are debited when you use a card, but only up to the amount you've authorized for the month on hard accounts. If you have say "33.49" in luxuries, and you try to charge 36 bucks, it denies it and sends you a text, "You only have 33.49 left in luxuries". If you try to make a charge in a soft account (aka one you're okay going over, but that it takes out of a different budgets, say Groceries will take out of dinning out), the charge will go through, and take any of the excess amount out of the account specified as the overflow.
There would be a webapp and smartphone app that would show all these balances on all these accounts you set up so you could see up to the minute how much was left on the cards.
Basically, 21st century envelope budgeting with no book-keeping once you set the budgets, with cards that work on the web or in restaurants or at any store.
It would be useful to everyone who's bad at balancing checkbooks, or money management in general, from teens to just people who are too busy to really worry about it.
Please oh please make this system :OD
That's well and good but have you ever legalized marijuana?
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
That's cool. Maybe a key idea here is not the different cards but the ability to track certain expenses by delegating categories to certain people. What would happen if any credit/debit card generated a text message when declined?
Maybe it will be possible to make apps that work like that on mobile devices equipped for NFC payments, and the cards won't be needed?
NFC won't be near enough widespread for this sadly