My wife is not down with using a digital envelope system, but has agreed to use a paper envelope with the amount that she is allowed to spend for the month in play money (we don’t use a lot of cash). When she spends, she gives me the play money and I track the expense. How do I track both her envelope and what she spends it on food, gas, etc. with Good Budget?
One way to do that is to create a separate account named “cash” or “wife’s cash”, or whatever. Then create an envelope with the same name. In order to give her the physical money you’ll have to do some type of physical withdrawal from the bank, right?. Well, in GB you’ll record this as a transfer from your bank account to “wife’s cash” account. You’ll also have to do a corresponding envelope transfer from an envelope of your choosing to her envelope.
When she spends the physical money on whatever, you’ll record in GB an expense transaction from her “account” to her envelope,. Her physical envelope balance and her GB envelope balance and her GB “account” should always be equal.
If you want to you can also track what she’s spends her money on by using sub-envelopes. But we can get into that after you understand what I’m talking about here.
There’s always more than one way to skin… err, I mean manage a budget, so others may very well chime in here and share how they do it. You just need to pick the method that makes the most sense to you.
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Totally agree here and want to add:
If she’s spending out of joint categories (eg she buys household groceries with “her” money) you can still manage this with one Groceries envelope. If you want to set up your budget this way, rather than “Her Groceries” and “My Groceries” as separate, we’ll be happy to share what that looks like too!
I think I have an idea of what you’re saying, but one detail, we’re not going to use real cash, just something in an envelope - monopoly money, photo copy some bills, something like that, in her “envelope”. When she spends something on the credit card, then she takes the corresponding amount out of her “envelope”. I’ll then track the spending in GB for both the money coming out of her envelope (although I might just take it out of the “general fund” since the idea is for her to limit her spending) and what category it was spent on.