New to GB, it worked great the first month and I thought it would be very easy to use the envelope method. However I went to fill my envelopes for February with my monthly allotted money (Amount of my two paychecks this month) and the envelopes won’t fill or only random ones I can manually fill? I am so frustrated, does anyone know what to do?
I’m not sure if you used a manual Fill or scheduled something just for this month, but it sounds like your Add and Set buttons may be reversed. For this month, you can either reopen the Fill that you already entered and click Add for each envelope, changing them to the amounts you wanted to the add, or just do a Fill now and add in the differences.
If it’s just a couple of envelopes you want to adjust, you can do Envelope Transfers from Unallocated to those envelopes.
Some people find the Add and Set buttons confusing because the active button is gray and the inactive is white, so be sure to click the button to make I’m sure it’s what you intend.
Does that help?
Where are add/set buttons located? I am using the app, I saw your replies on a few other posts but wasn’t sure where to locate them to try that. I had selected monthly fill to fill all envelopes and nothing happened, and then I went in to the fill and selected each envelope manually and only two envelopes had any money added to them, the rest stayed empty.
Blockquote
Ahh, I see, the buttons are on the website (which IMHO is just easier to use to set things up but not necessary!)
From the app (iOS at least; I don’t know about Android), you’d click the Fill that was just entered and see each envelope with “Add specific amount of $xxx” below it. You can click each of those envelopes and change the amounts added.
Alternately, you could delete the entire Fill and start a new one by adding a new transaction, changing the type to “Fill from Unallocated”, and then adding a description, date and schedule if you want it to recur. (Since we’re well into February already, you probably don’t want to do THIS fill as your regularly scheduled one, since it should be smaller than a full month’s budget. Just leave Schedule as “never” and do another one for the first-of-month recurring Fills)
If instead you want to fill your envelopes from a paycheck, choose “Add Income” as the transaction type and then choose “In my envelopes” to distribute it across them. In iOS there’s a toggle that switches from Add to Set, with a little description below it. Set will add whatever amount is necessary to get your envelope up to the budgeted amount, while Add will just add exactly the amount you specify even if it leaves your envelope over- or under-filled. If you have “Add” as the instruction but “$0” as the amount, it will leave it unchanged in this particular Fill (you can have several Fills too).
Ultimately you should be able to fill any or all envelopes with each Fill transaction, but the Add/Set toggle usually seems to be the culprit when things go sideways.
For the future, you might create a Fill instruction with the distribution from your paychecks (or do a separate Fill for each paycheck if your needs vary throughout the month). Be sure to check Schedule for your next payday, and be sure you use Add if you just want to put a specific amount of money in an envelope, or Set if you want it to bring it right up to the budgeted line.
Personally, I use “Set” for all my monthly envelopes on the 1st, but I use “Add” for things like savings or annual subscription envelopes that I want to continue to accumulate until they’re needed.
Long-winded, sorry, but I hope that’s helpful!
1 Like