Category Specific Declines

What If Part II: Personal Goal Enforcement

This is the second edition of my series “What If” and this time I had an idea for some personalization of data that would help enforce our goals.

Here’s the basic premise, what if you could set specific things on your credit card or debit card that were not allowed to be purchased. For example, if you are trying to lose weight so you say all fast food is not allowed, and if you do go there you get a decline with a message that says, “sorry #NAME# you can’t eat here, go somewhere else.”

Better yet it be even cooler if we could take it a step further and limit certain types of food, like no more sugar. So when you are at the grocery store you are automatically notified of things that are not on your approved list.

Furthermore, if we were able to make that happen, it should be easy to pull all our data out of every grocery receipt to dynamically see which things we got. Then you could get automated reports on how much you spent on certain types of foods, like cereal or beef or ice cream. Then you could easily 80/20 . your shopping to be more efficient and follow through with eating the right things.

The fundamental concept that I think should exist is personalized pre-programmed declines of things you don’t want that helps enforce goals you are trying to achieve. It wouldn’t be perfect but it would certainly help you get much further.

Plus, the idea of being able to control more personal purchase options with a tool like a credit card would be awesome, and with machine learning we could take it further to understand better trends and know when we might go purchase something against our goal.

The main problem with this is that the credit card and financing companies don’t want it to be any harder to spend money and owe them more.

Any other cool ideas you can think of if this were true?

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