Joy (Findjoy.com) is a personal finance app that concects your spending and your mood. This will combine psychology and financial behavior to change the way you perceive, spend, and save money.
The Thinking Behind Joy
With Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, authors Elizabeth Dunn, Ph.D., and Michael Norton outline five research-based principles to achieving financial happiness.
- People gain more happiness from buying experiences than material things.
- People find more happiness, on average, when they use their money to benefit others, rather than themselves.
- People feel more happy when they pay in advance for something they will consume later.
- People gain more happiness when they spend money to treat themselves.
- People find more happiness when they buy time, like buying their way out of cleaning the bathroom.
Joy Features
With the Science of Smarter Spending framework, Happy Money’s team of psychologists, neuroscientists, data scientists, financial professionals, and tech experts work together to make the Joy app. This free personal financial tool is made to specifically track how your spending makes you feel.
Link Your Accounts
When you use Joy, you’ll be able to connect your bank and credit card accounts to easily track your finances. All major U.S. banks and more than 20,000 other banks, credit unions, and credit card companies, have the ability to sync with the app.
Rate Your Purchases
This is the backbone of the Joy app. It will prompt you to rate your transactions as “happy” or “sad” spends. When you acknowledge how your spending makes you feel, you’ll get more of what makes you happy and less of what makes you sad.
Build Your Savings
Joy will make it much easier for you to save money by giving behavior-based daily savings recommendations and a free FDIC-insured savings account. Furthermore, this app will get your income data and spending habits to suggest an amount to put away each day.
Additionally, Joy will then prompt you to transfer that bit of savings to your Joy Savings account. It will allow you to recognize daily opportunities to save, build your savings, and get a sense of control over your financial future.
Figure Out Your Money Personally
Joy will ask you some questions and use your responses to get you a “money personality” which correlates to how you spend your money.
After they get this information, it will then personalize your experience in the app.
Meet Your Personalized Money Coach
You’ll be set up with a money coach, which is an artificially intelligent robot. How your coach interacts with you, encouraging you to do better, presenting goals, celebrating victories, and even punctuation, slang, and emojis will be based on your money personality.
You can start a chat with your coach whenever you want. The topics and responses are limited to the information you’ll need to use the app, but your coach can also give you reports on how you’re doing with your spending or saving (more on that below).
See Your Progress
See how your budgeting and savings have progressed over time by asking your money coach how much you’ve spent this month compared to last month, how your happy spends compare with sad spends, or how you’re doing with your savings habits compared with other people with the same money personality, and much more.
 |
 |
Conclusion
When you use Joy, it’s a great option to consider if you aren’t aligned with your spending habits entirely. This app will assist you on taking inventory of your finances, recognize how you spend, and connect it all with your emotions. You’ll be able to manage your money better and get some joy out of it as well.
