Digit Seems To Think I’m Richer Than I Am

Or, am I just that unaware of my spending habits?

While smushed in the back of a cab with my sisters on my way home from dinner this weekend, I checked my bank account and noticed that Digit, the app that I love but am now unsure of, had taken $77 out of my checking account and moved it to my savings account.

My Love Affair With Digit Rages On

I only noticed because I got a celebratory text from the app saying that I had over $500 in my savings account. The text was accompanied by a gif of the gentleman from the Lonely Island making it rain. I assume this was intended to be celebratory, but given that the last time I checked, my balance was somewhere in the $300 range, I assumed that something had gone terribly wrong and that they’d made a huge mistake. Maybe I gasped. I certainly wrote an email to myself that read “WHY DOES DIGIT SAVE AGGRESSIVELY AND WHY DOES IT SKETCH ME OUT.” I opened that email this morning and found myself still stymied.

That’s not an insignificant amount of money — it’s an amount that I would balk at if spent in one go and its not an amount that I take lightly. But, the app had done what it’s supposed to do, which is look at my spending, decide what I could reasonably live without and shuffle it away for safekeeping. The amount itself didn’t scare me, though maybe it should have. What did, however, was the fact that removing that amount of money from my checking account didn’t feel bad at all.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this says about my current financial state. I’m feeling better about my finances because I’m working and making more money and am therefore consumed with far less doom than I usually am. Digit, for what it’s worth, usually saves about $50 at most at a time. When I consider the days that its chosen to to do so, I generally agree with the decisions. On weekdays, I work. I eat at home, I don’t leave the house, and usually I don’t spend that much money. The robots responsible for moving my money around take note of what I’ve been up to and make a decision that has never actually affected my day to day. This decision -$77 of my stupid dollars — didn’t affect it either. All it did was make me think long and hard about my money.

Because my mind works in ways that are occasionally self-sabotaging and certainly fiscally irresponsible, I thought of all the things I could’ve bought with that money: a black t-shirt and a white one and maybe a grey; a sweatshirt or three; better socks; more plants; one moisturizer to rule them all. I need those things, if you define “need” as I occasionally do, as things that I want with varying levels of necessity, purchased with the intention of repairing some corner of my life that feels particularly careworn or damaged.

I considered moving the money back into my checking account, if only for the simple pleasure of seeing the number there go up by just under $100. Like flossing or regularly remembering to change the filter on the Brita, saving money sucks. But I guess it’s good for you. The $77 will stay.

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