According to OrSaveIt, the average person spends almost £3,000 each year on impulse purchases. So they’ve built an iPhone app they hope will encourage us to stop all the impulse spending and save the money for something bigger we really want, or perhaps more sensibly, for a rainy day.
The app is currently only available for the iPhone, and once you’ve signed up for an account, you can choose a goal, and start saving. The app is colourful and simple to use, so it’s easy to setup a savings goal and then add each saving, using the icons.
The developers of the app had hoped to be able to enable debits of the saved money into a separate account, so you could watch your money grow towards your goal, but they’ve found the cost of doing this prohibitive, so for the moment, you’ll be provided with “savings statement” at the end of each week that will let you transfer your savings to an account of your choice “within three clicks”.
There are already plans for new functionality in future versions of the app, such as a “savings alarm clock”, and a GPS impulse save function which will remind you when you are approaching a spending “hot spot”, plus an Android version is also on the horizon.
We’ll try the app out for a few weeks to see how we get on. My fear is that without the automatic debiting of the savings, and seeing the money actually build up some where, it’s going to be difficult to keep people interested in using the app.
Apps that track spending always seem to be a good idea, but having to manually add each entry soon becomes laborious; in the case of OrSaveIt, you’re tracking savings, not spending, but the problem remains. Let’s hope they find a way around the problem of debiting the savings.
OrSaveIt is available for free on iTunes.