budge. is a banking solution that helps users manage their food spending and reduce stress-related snacking.
BEHAVIOR
SERVICE
FINTECH
Problem
After a prediabetes scare, I saw how advice like “eat better and manage stress” collapsed into guilt instead of concrete decisions, especially for people living with long unbroken habits. People felt bad, but had no clear feedback loop connecting stress and diet.
Solution
I framed Budge around one question: "How can we introduce an environment that incentivizes spending money on healthy foods?" I treated the bank account itself as the intervention. That led to two pillars: 1. Curb spending on what you eat 2. Give people a physical object that embodies their goals.
I reframed the brief from “help people track their diet” to “help people notice and gently interrupt spend-triggered snacking.” Enabling a habit-stack value proposition. • Reframed the problem from “track your diet” to “banking for habit forming and nudging away from cravings,” grounded in real stress and eating behavior. • Combined patterns from mindful budgeting (YNAB) and teen checking habit-building (Capital One MONEY teen accounts) into incentives that reward healthy food purchases instead of punishing slips. • Used habit stacking and one-tap, low-effort actions (like diverting typical snack spend into a Snack Vault) to turn occasional good decisions into repeatable habits. • Introduced the Snack Vault as a playful, literal representation of goals that ties the digital account to a tangible, motivating object.