u/TameTheImp — reddlx

I left my Wall Street job 2 years ago to help people stop impulse spending and save money instead. We've helped 5K people save ~$1M so far. AMA about the psychology of impulse spending, shopping addiction, dark patterns in modern apps, or the consumer banking industry.

Hey! I’m Varun Suresh (proof). I'm the co-founder of Tame The Imp, a web/SMS-based service that uses behavioral psychology and gamification to help people stop impulse spending.

Americans spend around $652B a year on impulse purchases; that’s more than $3,000 per person.

Before discovering the huge impulse spending problem, I was focused on building a debt-free alternative to Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). But after speaking 1:1 with 200+ Gen Z consumers, I realized that BNPL was a symptom of something deeper. The money-related pain point that kept cropping up in these conversations was ordering Uber Eats when exhausted from work, or doomscrolling at 1am and buying random clothes -- and being unable to stop. In other words, the real antagonist was impulse spending, because it’s something people feel like they should be able to control but can’t.

Tame The Imp takes the same underlying mechanic that makes impulse spending so easy -- seeking dopamine -- and turns saving money into a game.

It uses psychological levers like positive reinforcement on a variable rewards schedule (get random plants when you stick to your spending goals) and negative punishment (The Imp steals a plant if you overspend) that have historically been used for money-draining things like casinos/lotteries but to actually do good instead.

Ask me anything about the psychology of impulse spending (r/shoppingaddiction has a bunch of DIY tactics to combat it), habit formation, or about the consumer banking industry.

u/TameTheImp — 4 days ago

▲ 26 r/shoppingaddiction

Three things I didn’t expect from running a spending challenge for 8 months

I've been running a free weekly spending challenge called Tame The Imp since last December. A few patterns have shown up in the data that I didn't expect, and a couple that contradict what I’ve seen online about impulse spending. Sharing in case it’s helpful for this community.

Low-buy beats no-buy, at least in the medium term. People who spend $0 on their category in week one are more likely to blow past their spending limit in later weeks. People who set a realistic limit and keep spending under it tend to stay under longer. Though some of this can be attributed to regression to the mean, it lines up with what a lot of you said in this thread about no-buy versus low-buy, where the consensus leaned the same way
Food delivery addiction keeps being bigger than I expect. Most people find us through content about late-night clothing impulse buys, and yet ~30% pick food delivery as the category they want to cut (note: it was 38% earlier this year). I think it's under discussed relative to how aggressive the dark patterns in food delivery apps are: push notifications timed to when you first get hungry in the evening, a checkout screen that congratulates you on "saving" money on food that's marked up from dine-in prices before the fees hit. u/stinky_winkler's suggestion of ordering groceries instead is a practical harm reduction step I've seen for it
Removing a reward might work as well as earning a reward in habit formation. Streaks are the standard advice here to form a no/low spend habit and they work. u/Expert_Regret_1837's "year-in-pixels" calendar is the version I always think of as a prime example, where you color in a square for every day you stick to your spending goals. What surprised me is that when we tested removing a reward for going over versus adding one for staying under, a chunk of people (not the majority, to be fair) responded better to the removal. I'm unsure what to do with that information. Positive reinforcement seems like the safer default – especially for impulse spending and shopping addiction – and guilt is already so tangled up in this realm of life that I'm wary of the finding even though it's what the data says

That last one is the one I’m most interested in hearing thoughts about: have you seen anything other than positive reinforcement work in breaking an impulse spending cycle?

reddit.com

u/TameTheImp — 24 days ago

▲ 46 r/shoppingaddiction

No-buy or low-buy: which one actually causes lasting change?

I've been reading a lot of no-buy / low-buy posts on here and the same question keeps bubbling in my brain: do they truly result in permanent change, or just cause a huge rebound in impulse spending after either the streak is broken or the challenge ends?

A few recent threads have different/interesting views:

u/soloshandpuppets' comment on this post stuck with me: no-buy might be the better tool short-term, but low-buy is what's actually sustainable long-term (basically a sprint versus a marathon… but marathons also come to an end)
u/Stylishreader did a no-buy that worked and hushed the "constant noise" from targeted ads on social media to buy stuff. But it took literally leaving the US and moving in with their grandmother in the Mediterranean for 3 months to make it stick
u/soloshandpuppets strikes again, but as an OP this time! They found that low-buy made shopping boring. Not usually a word with positive connotations but here it’s absolutely a good thing. They still got a little dopamine hit from small purchases (and even more from free finds), but it let them realize that each subsequent purchase granted diminishing returns which resulted in making shopping eventually feel boring

Putting these puzzle pieces together, the thing I can't figure out is whether the winning move is a hard no-buy reset to break the impulse spending cycle, then a low-buy you can actually live in OR whether no-buy just sets you up to rebound the second it's over OR whether a “low-buy” mindset is sustainable if it’s characterized internally as a specific “phase” (which might lead to backsliding).

So I'm interested to hear from those that have done low-buy/no-buy in the past: did the change stick after it ended, or did you rebound? For folks who stuck with low-buy/no-buy, did you ease into it with low-buy or take a cold plunge with no-buy and loosen up from there?

reddit.com

u/TameTheImp — 3 months ago

▲ 63 r/shoppingaddiction

Is food delivery the most overlooked form of shopping addiction?

I’ve noticed a growing number of posts on this sub recently specifically about food delivery addiction. A few recent examples:

u/yonkesssssss on how a DoorDash addiction isn’t just about food and should probably be classified as a shopping addiction
u/Zealousideal_Skin868 escalating from ordering 1-2x a week to multiple times a day, eventually spending more in a single day on delivery than a week on groceries
u/Mysterious-Trade1362 hitting 4-5x orders a day at their peak and getting stuck in a guilt/relapse loop that mirrors other forms of shopping addiction

I think about it a lot because there are so many costs involved. There's obviously a monetary cost: food delivery can be 80% more expensive than eating at a restaurant (let alone compared to groceries), there’s the mental cost of regret/guilt, and a physical cost too by eating unhealthier.

Some unique data from a free weekly spending challenge that I run that shows how prevalent the problem is:

60% of people pick food delivery OR restaurant dining as the thing they want to spend on less (compared to only 4.8% selecting “influencer recommendations,” our least selected category or 5.2% for "beauty")
Food delivery on its own is selected 38% of the time and is the most selected category

One note on the above data: it's from people who self-select the category they want to reduce impulse spending on. So it's not saying that most impulse spending happens on food delivery in raw dollar terms, just that it's what people generally want to reduce spending on the most.

What I think makes food delivery addiction especially hard to beat:

Dopamine is the underlying lever of shopping addiction. With food delivery, you get dopamine from the act of ordering AND the anticipation of the order arriving AND the actual food
You also can't really avoid the trigger easily. That’s like saying “don't be hungry” at 7pm after an exhausting work day. Our brains don't work that way

What's actually worked for y'all to resist the urge to order food delivery and break the cycle? Deleting apps, tracking daily spend, meal prep, or something else?

u/TameTheImp — 3 months ago