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MONBO

Be your own family finance mentor

MA 2022
Keywords
financial issues, spending, communication, marriage
Overview

Though the financial issue is a critical problem in families, couples, especially newlyweds of Gen-Y and Gen-Z may ignore the potential issues in their marriage and don’t know how to react properly when conflict happens. Through our service, we hope to create a future in which couples are more prepared to handle family financial issues.

Collaboration
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CHALLENGES


SPENDING: ONE OF THE MOST COMMON ISSUES IN A MARRIAGE

27% of married people indicate financial issues cause the most conflict in their home, and the main source of financial conflict was endorsed as Household expenses and personal spending.

For couples who don’t know how to deal with financial conflicts, these could have a lousy effect on their psychological, and emotional well-being, and even became a major issue in the breakdown of their marriage.


NEWLYWEDS: THE MOST RELEVANT GROUP FOR FINANCIAL PROBLEMS

Newlyweds of Gen Y and Gen Z are the groups that are most relevant to the issue, for they are usually at the carefree stage, the passion for love may make them ignore or despise their financial problems, while it is exactly the period they may start to pool money and make many financial decisions together.

DISCOVER


PHASE ONE: WHY DO COUPLES HAVE DISAGREEMENTS?

Not enough understanding

Although the pre-marital relationship will give them a general understanding of each other's spending habits, they do not know enough about the other's needs and spending preferences, and not knowing means not enough understanding.


PHASE TWO: WHY DISAGREEMENTS CAN'T BE SOLVED?

No effective communication

For many couples, it's hard to sit down and make space to have proper communication about money. Lacking methods makes them feel frustrated and tired rather than accomplished after communication.


PHASE THREE: WHY DISAGREEMENTS ESCALATE TO CONFLICTS?

No proper management

Some people deal with disagreements by avoiding and superficial compromise, but the disagreements doesn't go away. Instead, they lay the fuse for conflict.

KEY DIRECTION

How might we guide newlyweds to understand others' consumption choices and build effective communications to deuce family conflicts when they have different opinions around household expenses and personal spending?

DEVELOP

MONBO: GUIDE YOU TO BE YOUR OWN FAMILY FINANCE MENTOR

MONBO composes of two parts:

A tool card set as an easy entry to help couples understand each other’s consumption preferences and conduct discussions in simulated consumption situations.

And a website as a continuous guidance to assist couples by cross-evaluating their spending personality as well as to provide them with both peer and expert support.

VISION


STAKEHOLDERS

With MONBO, we are not only using tool cards to help couples with their financial communication problems. In addition, we will bring more experts from the marriage and financial industry to the platform. With their expertise, we aim to offer consultation and courses to our users. We will invite experts to collaborate on the design of the cards to provide users with the most professional communication tools and to make Monbo a potential consulting toolkit.

In addition, the content of the cards will be constantly updated based on user feedback. Some of the best communication guidance from our users will be added to our library through expert approval, and keep providing users with the latest and best content.

An expanded marketing channel will be implemented, we will create an influence on social media, as well as sell tool cards offline in retail stores.


FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

In the future, we see loads of possibilities on Monbo, it could be a party game, family game or speed dating activities; or more professionally, it could become a pre-marital financial check-up like physical check-ups, or be a practical tool in marriage or financial counselling, which will bring us the chance to cooperate with the dating app, marriage company, bank, and even Children's Education Company.

We’re looking forward to MONBO's future development.

SPECIAL
THANKS

Thank you to all the users who participated in the research and testing, the students who helped us along the way with the peer review and our tutor, Nina, for her valuable advice and careful coaching.

Team
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