Watching Over Money

Summary: You open it, close it, and reopen it at least twice a day. One of your most important storage devices, your wallet, has evolved over the years to an important financial tool and a personal journal. Storing receipts, bills, paper money, coins, credit or debit cards, your driver's license and even your local supermarket membership card, your wallet is perhaps the most important piece in your pocket or purse. But keeping score of your week's spending and managing to stay unde...

You open it, close it, and reopen it at least twice a day. One of your most important storage devices, your wallet, has evolved over the years to an important financial tool and a personal journal. Storing receipts, bills, paper money, coins, credit or debit cards, your driver's license and even your local supermarket membership card, your wallet is perhaps the most important piece in your pocket or purse. But keeping score of your week's spending and managing to stay under your budget's limit, is something that needs more precise effort than frequently checking the amount of cash you have left inside your wallet's compartments. Special tools, such as software applications, most of them stored in the memory of an electronic device like a personal computer or a blackberry, are extensively used for similar purposes since they assist contemporary busy individuals handle their finances, apart from their daily schedules. But these types of technologies cannot work without the necessary feedback from their user, meaning that the data needed to configure the spending limits of a person have to be entered into the system-or software program-from the individual himself or online through their choice of financial institution -if the necessary permission is given and the application allows such information to be stored automatically into the system. If you think of it, is like an invisible hand opens and closes your own wallet, but not with an intention to harm your finances. On the contrary, the issue here is to protect your saving and increase your investments' profit margins. So, it is like having a virtual friend, who acts according to your rules and takes care of your own pockets. Some applications have preinstalled features, like alarms, which are used by people to control as much as possible their spending patterns and allow them to feel free to spend up until a certain limit; how ironic does this actually sound. Yet, the ones who feel comfortable using such machines and program applications are mostly interested in keeping their finances organized and their future plans under control. It is not a matter of choice to them, as much as it is a necessity. Whichever your personal view on this subject is, you should be aware that these systems and applications exist, in order to be able to decide on your own whether or not you want to give them a try. Especially if you think that people will indeed someday stop worrying about loosing or someone stealing their wallets, then you should begin examining the horrifying scenario that one has now to worry in case he or she forgets a code, looses a password, or finds out that his identity has been stolen.