I hope this answers your questions:

1. I want to move the money around so I don't spend it and I know I have enough to pay my bills. I don't want to see $1,000 and think "I'm going to spend that". Similarly, I don't want to see a charge come through for a bunch of bills that I don't have enough money for.

2. In Simple's app, if you overspend in an expense or goal, it takes it out of your "safe-to-spend" amount (think: your total spending money). It notifies you that you "overspent" so you can move money around in your little envelopes to fix it.

3. In Simple's case, you have one literal checking and up to two literal savings accounts. The expense/goal "envelopes" are virtual buckets in the checking account, not actual accounts with account/routing numbers. In the past, I've used many literal checking/savings accounts for this purpose.

I still don't get how it's different in practice than something like the budget feature in Mint?

Basically it's pre-allocating the money instead of just watching what you spend and bucketing it as you go. But unless it's actually going to overdraft the account or decline your card somehow when a bucket is empty instead of taking it from the total amount, those are equivalent.

I think the main difference is in the quality of the experience. Their mobile app is a joy to use, and the integration with the actual banking side of things is reliable and instantaneous.

Instead of a separate budgeting app and banking app, you can tweak your budgets from the same place that you deposit checks and transfer money to other banks.

Does the Mint budget feature include rollover for money not spent?

I think so, but I leave it off to try and start from a clean slate and save a the leftover instead if possible. But you can also change the dates of charges, so you can move stuff to next month or the previous month if there was room left over which I find convenient for spreading out big purchases.

Having rollover is a defining aspect of envelope budgeting. I put aside $150/mo for house repairs. I may have multiple repairs a year, or go almost 2 years without repairs. Rollover makes it easy to make sense of this madness. Multiply this by M for M other categories where spending is not regular.

> But you can also change the dates of charges, so you can move stuff to next month or the previous month if there was room left over which I find convenient for spreading out big purchases.

I do not want to alter the actual record of charges - that would cause lots of other problems. And I don't want to manually babysit this. I want to be able to get a balance of my account with all the money set aside subtracted out (regardless of whether it was spent or not).

Envelope budgeting is an incredibly simple algorithm, and I find it quite disheartening that most open source financial software does not support it. YNAB has shown how helpful it is to many, many people. I think Ledger and hledger are the only open source applications I know where one can do this.

Geez people are really religious about this stuff. I don't get why I got downvoted just trying to answer someone's questions about features in a software product and explaining how I use them.

If this is what works for you then great. You've convinced me that home/car repairs in particular should rollover, I'm going to start doing that in my budget. All I was saying is that by default I don't want things like food or shopping budgets to roll over, since I don't want to spend money I don't need to just because it was in the budget. It's just what works for me.

What of you do most transactions with a credit card. (I use a credit card for almost everything for the points, and pay it off in full every month.)

Can it categorize specific CC transactions, and pull the money out of that envelope when you pay your CC bill?

Mentally, moving the money into different envelopes keeps you from spending money you don't have. Behind the scenes, I think they only use one bank account with one account number, but it helps you mentally keep track of where things should be.

You can specify daily transfers to slowly fill up an emergency fund or vacation. The beauty is when your car breaks down, you might have a repair fund that you can deduct from and you don't see your main balance drop.

But it's all just lipstick on a bank. When I used them, I think it was Bancorp, but they moved to a spanish bank when I hopped off.

No, the money is tagged differently but is all in the same account.

For people who have no self control without resorting to playing tricks on themselves I guess. I can't empathize at all, all I need is a spreadsheet at most, but I guess it works for some people.

I can't empathize with your lack of empathy. All I need is to try to put myself in someone's else shoes to feel empathy, going through what they're going through is not required.

I understand it like I understand some people are allergic to fish, but I can't directly empathize with them either because I've never had an allergic reaction. You knew what I meant.

I know what you meant, and you meant contempt.

> For people who have no self control without resorting to playing tricks on themselves I guess

I struggled with money for a long time before a bunch of “tricks” helped get my life in order. There are a lot of things that affect this in psych literature, including growing up poor and several mental disorders. Congrats that your particular circumstances never made this an issue for you.

Bragging about your lack of empathy doesn’t make you a badass, it just makes you sound like a dick.

I’m great with money and I used to use a spreadsheet but Simple is so much nicer because it’s highly automated.

It’s a well made, convenient tool. Insulting people because they use tools is idiotic.

This is no different than a spreadsheet or a personal accounting system, it's just opinionated and made easy for people to implement. I could see why some people would like it. I can also see where it's extra for many people.

That's how it happens to people. They believe they are right and it's others who have no self control. How do you know you have more self control than these people? Can you confirm it?