Could I start tomorrow? Putting money back into our hands by facilitating a value-driven approach to financial decision-making

Abstract

This graduation project was initated in collaboration with Nibud to explore and imagine possibilities to facilitate a value-driven approach to financial decision-making. Several factors stress the relevance of this challenge, in particular regarding millennials as a target group. From an economic point of view, millennials are facing an affordability crisis (aging population, student debt, expensive housing, flexibile contracting and a looming recession). From a psychological perspective, a disparity seems to exist between what people expect will increase their wellbeing versus what types of consumption actually succeeds in doing so. Therefore, prioritizing saving over spending can be seen as an alternative way of sustainably increasing wellbeing. Millennials their early stage of life, digital nativity and strong sense of autonomy allows for opportunities to unburden them from financial hardship, yet the field of personal finance has seen surprisingly limited technological development aimed at this potential. With cash slowly being replaced by thoughtless payment, digitalization has left people with obscured and chronologically fragmented financial transactions that provide little feedback on their consumption pattern. This limited facilitation to prioritize saving over spending raises the threshold for attaining a financial overview up to a level that is only accessible to a happy few that is both highly motivated as well as tech-savvy. Furthermore, current solutions offer limited connection between short-term decisions and prospective long-term wellbeing (saving goals) and instead remain oriented towards retrospective micro-management. Lastly, commercial parties extracting sensitive personal data can count on public distrust, which is less of an issue for an independent foundation like Nibud. Using a ViP inspired approach, many factors were turned into six clusters that provided interesting directions in which to generate ideas on how Nibud can grab the opportunity of increasing millennials their agency to proactively prioritize saving over spending and thus unburden their lives from financial stress. The final design proposal is a participatory savings program called ‘meesparen’. Besides setting, tracking and comparing efforts at reaching saving goals, the application also supports a clear overview on recurring expenses, free spending and saving goals, which can be compared to peers that are motivated to start saving as well. The design was evaluated and redesigned to clearly demonstrate its potential to help millennials put money back into their hands.