My Guest Post on 20SomethingFinance: Budgeting with Envelopes
If you’ve ever tried to live on a budget but gave up because things got too complicated, you’ll want to check out my guest post on 20SomethingFinance. I talk about the simplest (and, in my opinion, the best) method of staying on track with your spending: plain old envelopes, filled with plain old cash. You’ll see why simpler is better, and how to tweak this method to work for your family.
What do you think about using cash to help manage spending? If you’ve tried it, how did it work for you?
I’ve tried cash envelopes a few times, but we generally run into problems when we forget to take the grocery envelope with us shopping, it is too much work to run back home with 3 small kids. We just want to get it done. So we end up using the debit card and we still have the cash in the envelope. Also, if my wife keeps the grocery envelope and asks me to pick up something from the store on the way home from work, that tends to break the system as well.
We finally just gave up on the whole cash system and went back to debit cards. I wrote Inzolo.com because I love the envelope system, but like I said, we struggled with the cash part of it.