The envelope system is to help you not over spend each month. Imagine you do this with cash instead of writing checks or using a debit card.
Basically, you know how much income you're going to get each month. That's all the money you get, so that's all you can spend, unless you go into debt, a no-no. So you take that money and divide it up into envelopes, pretty much a guesstimate if your bill aren't the same each month. Now, as bill come due, take the money from that envelope and pay the bill. This system is supposed to stop you from over spending for each expense you have. Once the money is gone from the Dining envelope, you can't spend anymore on dining, for the simple reason there's no money in the envelope to spend. You also happen to have an Entertainment envelope. What you are doing is making a decision that you would rather eat out more than entertain yourself. So you take money from the Entertainment envelope and put it in the Dining envelope. Obviously, you are now going to spend less on entertainment for the month. If you do this every month, then you might as well allocate more to dining than entertainment each month instead of having to steal from the Entertainment envelope. Now if you truly don't want to overspend on dining, then when the envelope is empty, don't go dining until it gets filled again. That's how it's supposed to work. Most accounting apps work the opposite. You get your income, spend it, then once the month is over, you go back and see how much you spend on each expense. On Apr 3, 2009, at 12:25 PM, Patricia Cross wrote: > I guess I'm not normal because I noticed it nearly immediately. I > always have to adjust nearly every figure in the Allocate Income > window because it counts all the manual money flows. The fact that I > overspent my dining bucket in the first half of the month and had to > steal from the entertainment bucket to cover it does not mean that I > want to get even less money put in my dining bucket for the second > half of the month. Nor do I want excess money placed in the > entertainment bucket to make up for the money I moved over to the > dining bucket. Am I just weird, or not understanding envelope > budgeting properly? Terry Norton I started off with nothing...I still have most of it left. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
