OUTCOMES

The era of debit and credit card spending makes it especially easy to detach from a sense of financial wellbeing. By syncing with customers' credit and debit cards, Budget Buddy discreetly provides meaningful feedback on the health of its users’ rate of consumption, to help them make more accurate and responsible spending decisions.

This "works-like" prototype of Budget Buddy technology represents how much of a consumer's budget is spent relative to how much of the month is gone.

In its final form, Budget Buddy would be worn on the wrist of its consumer, in order to maximize the utility of the real-time insights it confers. Accordingly, next steps would involve soliciting the support of a mechanical engineer who could iterate in a smaller size and develop the mechanism that would allow us to control each of the clock hands independently of each other. We would also explore a 360 degree range of motion. Later iterations might involve more intricate displays of a rotation of budgets (ie., food, gas, entertainment etc), perhaps communicated via different background LEDs; perhaps they would also involve a linear display of projected proximity to lifetime savings goals, based on projections of repeating recent under-budget behaviors.