Mat Siltla

Family Budgeting, and why I am stressed as hell lately.

As a general rule, I try not to promote companies that I do work for. However, rules are meant to be broken and lately we has been doing some work for a company called Finicity, which provides money management tools like household budgeting software. You may have heard of them as Mvelopes.com (their former name). Their flagship product is called envelope budgeting and is based on a pretty old budgeting method which actually used envelopes. A family would attach several envelopes to the wall and label each envelope for an expenditure. i.e. An envelope for mortgage, envelope for groceries, envelope for gas, etc. Inside each envelope the family would place the amount of cash dedicated to that area of the monthly budget. i.e. Mortgage envelope might contain $1000.00, gas envelope contain $200.00, etc. The family would be committed to only spending the amount of money placed in the envelope at the beginning of the month. In this fashion, they were able to stay on budget.

Finicity (as well as several other companies like Dave Ramsey, etc.) has taken this concept into the 21st century with electronic envelope budgeting. Today you will not find actual envelopes taped to my wall and stuffed with cash, but if you were to peek inside the ol’ family computer you would see a number of virtual envelopes stuffed with emoney. The cool thing about the Finicity software is that it is synced with your online banking so that each expenditure can be automatically deducted from the envelope. In other words, when the waitress runs your credit card after your family trip to Olive Gardenfor $45.47, you will find that $45.47 is automatically deducted from the Meals Out envelope.

Anyway, I am sure that many of you have been receiving emails from well intentioned friends (like my wife) which suggest the world is about to end, and that you better have your food storage, gun cabinets, and family budgets in place. For those of you who do not know where to start on the budgeting side of things, I thought this budgeting system was worth mentioning.