Paying things with cards is weird for me. I mean obviously the convenience of having a plastic card that gets me stuff is great – I got to take advantage of the Threadless sale, for instance – but without that tangible sense of loss at having to fork over a wad of cash, there is the risk of going overboard is substantial. Folks at MIT have some ideas about that.

See, the setup is that these wallets connect to the owner’s online bank account, and react according to how much money is being spent; the first guy expands or contracts depending on how much cash is in a given account, the second vibrates whenever a transaction is made, and the third gets harder to open the closer you get to reaching a monthly spending limit. It’s clever.

Obviously, none of this is going to prevent you from whipping out a credit card and going Charlie Sheen on us, but the idea of reminding people that they’re spending real money with tangible reminders is a pretty rad one.

[Source: MIT]
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