How to Implement an Envelope Budgeting System
Debit cards have been sold as a safer alternative to credit cards, but when it comes to budgeting they can be just as dangerous. That’s because debit cards offer the same convenience as credit cards and people don’t feel the emotional twinge of money actually leaving their wallets. For this reason, my family recently went to a cash-only budgeting system using envelopes.
Listed below are the steps we took to implement our envelope budgeting system:
Step 1: Determine which categories to include in your budget. Not everything in your household budget can fit into an envelope, literally. Things like utilities, subscriptions, and other recurring monthly bills are typically paid online or via bank draft. The real spending categories we are interested in are discretionary spending categories. For our family these are food, household products, gifts, entertainment, and clothing. In the beginning we also included gasoline, but the pay-at-the-pump feature is just too convenient to pass up on a cold, rainy day, so we still use our debit card at the pump. Who wants to carry kids into a convenience store to pay for $30 worth of gas in cash?
Step 2: Use past spending to establish initial budget amount. Using Microsoft Excel and my online banking system’s export feature, I downloaded our last 90 days of transaction history. I identified which transactions fit into each of the five categories listed above. This is not an exact science as $45.90 spent at Walmart won’t help you remember the itemized list of transactions, and to which category they belong. If you still have some receipts, great. If not, just estimate your typical breakdown on a trip to Walmart. For us a $45 transaction at Walmart might look like: $20 on groceries, $10 on clothing, $15 on household products. Using your best estimate come up with an average monthly expenditure for each category.
Step 3: Create an envelope for each spending category. Write the name of the category and the monthly amount budgeted on the outside of the envelope. You may not have enough float in your checking account to withdraw all the cash to fill all the envelopes with your first paycheck each month. That’s fine, just break down the monthly budget amount by the number of times you are paid in a month. In our family the “Food” envelope gets $200 every two weeks (I am paid biweekly), for a $400 monthly grocery budget.
Step 4: When the envelope is empty, stop spending. The only way this budgeting system will work is if you make a pact up front not to move money between envelopes, and to not spend additional money in a category when the envelope runs dry. If the “Food” envelope is empty three days before payday then you better start searching the freezer for those two-year old corn dogs. If your “Clothing” envelope only has two dollars in it you have to pass up those “fabulous shoes” on sale at the mall.
Step 5: Revise and repeat. No budget is going to be perfect from month-to-month, and envelope budgeting systems are certainly no exception. At the end of the month look back at your spending and determine where you could have allocated a little more, and where you assigned too much of your paycheck. We routinely have more in our clothing envelope than planned, but we simply leave the money in there because clothing purchases tend to come in waves when the weather changes, or as the kids outgrow their current wardrobe. We empty the other envelopes at the end of the month to make an extra contribution to our debt snowball. This gives us a little extra incentive to try to stay under budget in each category.
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Jason - I am a firm believer in carrying and using cash to make purchases. Whenever you have to pull out cold, hard cash to make a purchase it has a different psychological impact compared to using plastic, even if it is a debit card. We have used the envelope system and it works great. I highly recommend it to anyone trying to get control of their money. My wife and I have been using for about the last 18 months and in that time it has helped us to control our spending and pay off a lot of debt. We use physical envelopes for carrying cash, but we also use Mvelopes.com for our overall spending plan and money tracking system. It is an online version of the envelope system and it is far superior to any others that I have seen. Great article!
I am a big believer in cash too and we use the envelope system in our house too. Everyone gets an allowance for the month and we can use it on whatever we want. I tend to spend mine on coffee out while my husband spends his on lunches at work. I have a “thrift store” allowance too to keep even that in check. It helps me think a little more about what we are spending and I check in with Quicken often too.
Thanks for the great suggestions!
“Searching the freezer for those 2 year old corn dogs.”
Have you been in my freezer? I’ve got those plus some Stouffers Lasagna that’s been in there forever!
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I’m also a believer in cash. I get paid once a month, which is directly deposited into my checking account, and then everything else is automatically deducted, and spoken for, except for my discretionary income. For that, what I like to do is to go to the ATM on the 1st and withdraw 1/2 of it for the first two weeks of the month and put it in envelopes like you described, and then on the 15th go to the ATM and collect the other half. That gives me the peace of mind that I won’t run out of money by the end of the month. (I agree w/you re the convenience of using the debit card for gas, so do that too).
My wife and I tried the envelopes and it didn’t work so well with us. I think we were just too lazy to cash our paychecks each week, I dunno.
Kudos for those of you that use this and have it work for you.
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I’m just now nearing the end of my first budget cycle with envelopes and cash. Previously, I tried to budget, but used a debit card and found it easy to overspend in categories if I knew that money was available.
So far, I’m finding this very helpful in getting back in control. It looks like I’ll come in significantly under budget in all categories. That hasn’t happened in a long time.
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I know debit cards make it easier when it’s raining and your kids are with you, but I disagree that they’re the same as using a credit card except that you’re spending your own money. Debit cards do not have the same protections as credit cards. The standards for reporting fraud are stricter, you stand a chance of being out $500 instead of a maximum of $50, and that’s $500 of your own money, not $500 of a credit line. (Which, admittedly, would be worse–but credit cards don’t leave you liable for that much in the first place.) Not to mention the habit of some retailers to put holds on debit cards for as much as $75 a pop.
There is a time and a place for debit card use, but I think they should be used as little as possible.
As for the gas station scenario, I read an author once who said you should never let the tank get below a quarter full, and that it’s best to get it filled in the morning so you get more gas and less fumes. It’s probably also best to note when the tank’s getting empty while your kids are not around.
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