I was reading this article yesterday and it got me thinking that it would make for a fun DIY project.
If you don’t feel like reading the article, the idea is to create a sort of automatic savings plan/budget. You allocate all your income by percentage into a set of jars, then as you need to spend your money, you pull the money out of the appropriate jar (or in the case of the savings jars you don’t pull the money out). I like the concept of it since I like loose, category based budgets rather than overly strict budgets. Anyway, this idea is great and all, but lets face it, no one wants to have jars of their money sitting around. At the very least I want it in a SmartyPig account earning some modest interest.
Back to my DIY project idea. This concept seems ripe for sticking a simple LED display onto a jar and somehow connecting that to a mint.com account. So I could have a set of jars on the counter with an LED display relating in near-realtime how much money I had in that “jar” which could just be a budget category from mint.com.
I recognize that this is somewhat silly and overkill, but it just seems like it would be a neat way to really visualize your savings and budget without having to go to a website. Of course, now I just need to figure out how in the hell I would do this. Maybe Make has some tips…there goes the afternoon.
