Not sure if this has been posted here before, but I would like to share with you guys what my wife and I do for budgeting. We tried physical envelopes WAY too many times and failed every time. Why? For the same reason as everyone else, we would want to buy something, but our money was at home (didn't want to constantly carry around large sums of cash). It was an unsustainable system for us.
Now what we use is online bank debit cards. We have Ally, two simple accounts, capital one 360 account, and a CU debit card.
Our digital envelopes are as follows:
Ally: all money come in here, and all bills are paid through here via online. All money to our other accounts come from here
simple: We each have a simple account that is our own, every month $100 is transferred from Ally to each of our simple cards. This is our "mad" money, no questions asked. What we REALLY like about simple is it is CRAZY easy to send money from one simple account to another. So when we go out to eat, my wife rarely brings her wallet, but after I pay for dinner, I tell her what the total cost of the meal + tip is, and she whips out her phone, and in 30 seconds my phone dings with payment for half the meal.
Capital One 360: We each have a debit card attached to this account. Every month money is transferred from Ally to this account for groceries. CO360 has a great app that lets us track how much is on the card so we know how much we can spend at the end of the month. Now I can drive home from work, get a text from my wife that we need milk and be able to charge it to the groceries account with no added effort. No matter who is buying groceries, it comes out of the same account.
CU debit card: This is the same story but for household stuff. We both have a card of this account as well.
With all accounts we opted to NOT allow our cards to go into overdraft, so if we don't have enough money for the thing, then we don't buy it, that simple. Since we started doing this, we have saved SOOO much money in being able to limit what we can buy, we have a set budget, and it is literally impossible to go over the budget unless we breakout credit cards ( which is a BIG no-no)
We really enjoy this system and has worked out very well. Hopefully this helps someone else!
May 24, 2017 at 06:01PM
