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