CHLOE MARTEN
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
25 03 2018
In class visuals: Project Proposal
Your Spending is a Reflection of You
Peter Torelli, 20 Years of Memories Tucked Away in Personal Finance Data I originally reviewed Peter Torelli’s personal finance tracking project in a previous class assignment. His project was the initial inspiration to track and analyze my historical spending. While I have passively tracked my personal finances in the past using applications, such as Mint, I never found these apps to be super insightful. Rather they made me feel bad about overspending in mundane categories like ‘Coffee’. What I like about Peter’s project is that it focuses less on the numbers and more so on what your spending says about you and your life.
Carl Richards, “Your Spending Choices Often Reflect Your Values”
In his NYT’s money column Sketch Guy, Carl Richards argues that the way you spend your money is correlated with your inner values. Credit card statements, he says, “lay out how we spend our money and our time. As a result, we end up with a clear picture of what we value versus what we say we value.” He demonstrates in reviewing his personal statements how is spending is sometimes in contrast to what he actually values in life. His call to action? To flip the script and let your values dictate your spending rather than the other way around.
Your Money Personality
Joy: Happy Spending & Saving App The Joy app attempts to help users spend and save happier by focusing on the person rather than the numbers. It does so by identifying user’s personality and then assigning them a personal money coach bot. It also helps users discover which spends make them happy by having them rate individual purchases. The idea is interesting, but from my limited usage of the app it was unclear how this app works and what value it brings. One App Store review mentioned the app’s grouping of users into certain personalities, but its lack individual personalization:
- "The app really boxes you in. It’s an awesome idea but I kind of feel like the developers thought people are really fiscally irresponsible-which is true-and can’t be trusted to make their own decisions..for me, the feel is that it groups users into buckets (those bot advisors), but it doesn’t see the individuality within users within each group. I understand the thought is that we rate all our purchases individually but that’s clearly not enough."
Joy’s parent company, Happy Money, claims to be “the only financial company that combines psychology and money to help people live happier lives.” Financial psychology and behavioral finance are nothing new. It’s something used by advertisers and marketers to target us for various products and services. But within recent years there has been increased interest in using your financial personality as a way to better understand and manage your finances.
More on Behavioral Finance & Financial Personality
- https://www.ft.com/content/5e8da24c-bb09-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/03/04/myers-briggs-your-wallet-learning-your-financial-personality-could-be-the-key-to-fixing-your-money-woes/
- http://themoneycouple.com/money-personality-profile/
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-over-money/201001/the-big-lie-about-personal-finance
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/financialfinesse/2017/04/12/save-more-money-by-meeting-your-older-retired-self/#48e2f5f331ef
For my final project, I intend to explore myself through my personal financial data. I want to get a deeper grasp of what my personal finances say about me by answering the following questions:
- What do I spend my money on?
- How have my financial habits changed over time?
- Do my finances accurately portray who I think I am?
The objective for this project is to create a persona of myself based on my financial data. As far as final deliverables, this could be a timeline, a defined persona, and/or a personal financial dashboard that represents the financial insights found.
Mood Board
The overall goal for my project is a comment on taking ownership of your data and, ultimately, yourself. As we move into an increasingly digital world with products and services using advanced machine learning, it is important for us to understand what data we are putting out there into the world. Our data is a reflection of who we are and what we do – but is it saying what we want it to say? Are we comfortable with machines potentially knowing more about us than we know ourselves?
I initially outlined how I would go about gathering and visualizing my financial data in this exercise. I have run into some issues gathering historical data as most institutions only provide 5 months of credit card data and 24 months of depository data (checking/savings account). While I will not be able to analyze much of my historical spending (due to the credit card limitations), I will be able to see changes in my checking and savings (% of money coming in vs % going out) over two years and cross reference with events in my life. For spending, I will do a more recent analysis of where I spend my money currently and use this data to help inform my last question (do my finances accurately portray who I think I am?).
Instead of using Plaid to access my financial data, I will export CSVs from my various financial accounts. I will still use Jupyter to plot my financial data overtime, which I will use to visualize and do my personal analysis (see below sketches). From there, I will use a design tool I am more familiar with, such as Sketch or Illustrator, to design my financial persona/dashboard based on the insights I gathered.
Presentation and concept comments:
Interestingly enough, you may have recognized that these categorizations feel awfully familiar to the ways that design thinking methods try to bin their audience/users/personas in order to develop and design for a target audience but by doing so lose a lot of the fidelity of the messiness of people
Technical hints:
Thanks for your effort! Looking forward to your developments!