I just made a reservation for a flight to Denver for mid-October. It’s a fairly short trip, but I’m still going to be careful! Consider packing one extra pair of shoes or a bulky sweater and you could find yourself breaking the new luggage restrictions being imposed by many airlines. A month ago, when I flew to Seattle with my family, the lady in front of me had to cough up $25 for the extra seven pounds in her bag. That was on top of the $25 for checking a second suitcase.

So, coming back on that trip, we were extra cautious, since we’d picked up a few souvenirs along the way — easily enough to push the weight limit of our biggest bag over our airline’s 50-pound limit. The challenge was weighing the bags once we’d packed them. The friends we were staying with had a marvelous, nuclear-powered digital scale. But setting a thick suitcase on the scale and trying to get a readout at the same time was a challenge in eye-hand coordination.

There oughta be a better way to find out what a suitcase weighs. And that’s where the Balanzza Ergo digital luggage scale comes in. It sells for exactly the same amount as the penalty you’d pay for going over the limit one time.

The little object weighs 12 ounces and is small enough — 11 x 6 x 1.5 inches — to stash in your luggage or carry on with you.

To use it, first, you calibrate it, which means pushing buttons on the gizmo in a certain order. Once you’re ready to weigh a bag, you turn the unit on and let it warm up for 30 seconds, then place the bag to be weighed into the strap. You lift the object until the scale beeps at you, which means the weight has been locked and displayed.

If you’re like me and the weight exceeds the airline limit, you shuffle objects around from bag to bag, remove a few books from the suitcase and cram them into your knapsack and ponder whether you really do need to haul home that special bowling ball-sized rock you picked up on the beach at sunset.

It’s really all about informed choices, isn’t it?