Zero an envelope that is in the red without using New or Available income?

1

I have a couple of envelopes that are in the red and I see no way of ever catching up on them, so is there a way to zero out those envelopes without using New or Available income

2

Hi @Wade - Thanks for your post! If you don’t want to use new income or your Available to pay back those Envelopes, your other option is to use Envelope Transfers to pull money from Envelopes that have a surplus into the Envelopes that are negative. You can see how to create Envelope Transfers here: https://goodbudget.com/help/budgeting-with-goodbudget/how-to-transfer/

3

The problem is, there is no extra money in other envelopes to pull money from. I saw a post where someone had a car lone payment and the their car was totaled in an accident and the insurance paid off the amount owing and that was handled in Goodbudget by setting the balance to ‘0’. I was wondering if there was a way to do that with an ‘envelope’?

4

Hey @Wade - I replied to your direct email. But I’ll add my reply in case other folks have similar questions.

Envelopes can’t be adjusted independently like Accounts can. That’s because Envelopes are bound by how much money is in the Accounts that are being tracked.

So to get to your question, apart from creating an Envelope Transfer to move money around, or by Filling your Envelopes with new or existing money, there isn’t a way to simply reset a Envelope to zero. The other option is to slowly work to pay back those negative Envelopes overtime by filling them a little bit each time you add money, rather than resetting them to zero all at once.

5

Hi Karisa: this is really the crux of what I am not understanding. I have started over with Goodbudget and my envelopes seem to go into the red right away. Then I do a fill but I am still behind. Then I have to reset my accounts because the unallocated (now available) is no longer accurate. It is a vicious circle and I think that the problem is that I just don’t understand how the envelopes work with the unallocated funds and the fills. Do I need to go into Goodbudget everyday to move money around so that envelopes don’t go into the red?