Introducing Rule 👑

After months of hard work we are delighted to introduce our new project, Rule. Rule exists to give people tools that help them manage their spending, and to conquer their savings goals. Great, sounds like another budgeting app with graphs and some transactional data? What's different?

Budgeting hurts our brains

Budgeting for the vast majority of people doesn't work. It's because depriving ourselves feels crap, and because of that, long term it is difficult if not impossible to stick to. It's kind of like going on a crash no-sugar diet, only to realise 2 weeks in you really miss eating cake. Very often we fall back to the same habits as before.

In addition, when we become overwhelmed our minds can struggle to cope and we lean towards avoiding and not dealing with issues. This is why we believe that traditional budgeting, with loads of numbers, whether that be in a spreadsheet, online banking or a budgeting app, is difficult to use as a tool for long lasting behaviour change.

Marketing is great at hitting our impulse spending button and leads us to ignore any vague budgeting decisions we made on our spreadsheets. To get a little technical, we value feeling great today over the impact that decision may have on our future self. This is called the opportunity cost, and we humans are terrible at thinking this way when it comes to spending i.e. When I buy a coffee I generally don't consider whether or not this impacts my ability to afford a future holiday.

We wanted to look at "budgeting" in a different way. The majority of our savings can be found in the 1-5 bad spending habits that we mindlessly repeat in our day to day lives. Much simpler than the 100's of transactions in a whole month's spending. That coffee you buy every day on the way to work, the midweek takeaways, the Lime bikes are all examples we've personally found eating away at our potential savings.

"Budgeting feels crap because we are telling ourselves we can't have things and that is difficult to stick to long term"

All makes sense, so what the heck are you doing?

Rule is a money app that will focus first and foremost on our habits. The app will allow people to discover their worst spending habits, and the actual cost of those over the course of a year. Knowing you buy coffees isn't as impactful as seeing it cost you £1,000 in the last 12 months.

People can then set rules to these habits, visualising the impact of the rules they set towards their goals.

A positive byproduct will be seeing your savings number increase, rather than that being the primary focus. Think of Rule as a method of visualising the opportunity cost of your spending behaviour.

Tackling people's spending is just the beginning. We are creating an ethical money app, with the wants and needs of the people that use it being our priority. We will use behavioural science black magic for good, rather than encouraging our worst impulses.

With ❤️ Alexis, Jude Michalis & Dan