Want to Stop Your Impulse Spending? A High-Tech Purse Promises It Can Help
Life and Leisure

Want to Stop Your Impulse Spending? A High-Tech Purse Promises It Can Help

finder.com/ibag

Forget therapy, cutting credit cards or freezing them in a block of ice. Shopaholics now can carry a purse that literally locks down their spending impulses.

The iBag2 is a chic handbag armed with a microprocessor that will lock itself during the times of day your most vulnerable to spend or when you enter a shopping danger zone.

The bag also offers other cues to curb impulse buys. Every time you take your wallet out, the bag will vibrate and light up blue to help you remember your spending resolutions. If you’re close to any pre-programmed vulnerable spending zones, the GPS-enabled bag will vibrate and shine amber lights.

Extras include two USB ports, one to power the bag and another to charge a smartphone. It also has a Bluetooth tracker that will alert your phone through an app if the bag is too far from you. The bag also will light up yellow every two hours to remind you to apply sunscreen.

Related: America’s Love of Credit Cards at an All-Time High

The bag was designed by engineers from Colmac Robotics Ltd. and New York-based fashion designer Geova Rodriguez on behalf of personal finance site finder.com. An earlier version was released in Australia in 2014, but didn’t include the self-locking mechanism. The team plans to unveil a men’s iBag2 prototype in December.

“We created the iBag2 because we are committed to helping people make smarter decisions about money,” Michelle Hutchinson, money expert at finder.com. “While the iBag2 will help you be more conscious of your spending, it’s only a short-term solution.”

It’s also an expensive (and possibly counterproductive) solution. The bag will retail for $5,000. That’s just below the average credit card debt of $5,247. That means the average person would need to double their credit card debt just to pay for the product that’s supposed to limit their spending.

It may be financially savvier to just cut up those credit cards.

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