Your budget is not static, so there will be times when you do not have enough budgeted for your spending. When one of your categories is overdrawn, increase the budgeted amount for that category so it is 0 or greater.

Using Hold for Next Month will ensure that the funds are no longer available to budget in the current month but can still be allocated to the budget in any subsequent month. This will be particularly useful for those who are looking to stop living paycheck to paycheck and instead gradually get one month ahead i.e. living on last month's income rather than this month's.

We find the best way to track your money is rooted in something called envelope budgeting. Instead of predicting how much you'll make and spend and trying to reconcile that with what actually happened, envelope budgeting embraces real income as the source of your budget instead. This means you can only budget money that you already have. You can think of categories as little funds that you deposit money into. Combined with our rollover system, it provides an intuitive way to handle a lot of things that come up in life. And you know it's always accurately depicting your finances — there's no made up numbers.

Contrary, zero based budgeting keeps the focus on your paychecks and forces you to divide it over your budgets. Your primary driver becomes how much money you make and not how much money you spend. This is an important distinction.

I’ll be honest — tracking finances is boring. It’s the flossing of adulthood. Everyone knows they should do it, almost nobody actually does.

The other budgeting tool is the Spending Plan. Most of it flows out of transactions you’ve imported and categorized. This tool takes your income after bills, subscriptions, transfers, and savings are deducted, and subtracts planned spending, which can be one-time purchases or monthly expenses that fluctuate, like groceries and gas.

The app’s developers and early users found that people spend discretionary money differently each month, making it difficult to create a workable budget.

I found this strange too. I de-linked all the bills and subscriptions from the budget (spending plan) in Simplifi and added them to the planned expense section. After that, the budget is more Mint like for me.

I tried Simplifi a little bit more and I agree: their budgeting feature does not make sense to me. They separate bills and subscriptions from the spending plan, making it impossible to see every planned expense against my projected income. It also doesn’t offer an easy way to cover overspending by transferring available money from other categories.

It seems better now but I don't like how it you can't easily roll with the punches if you go over something. It's not as easy as taking from another category and applying the funds you can only increase the current category. So you don't really know how much you have to spend.

Predictable expenses that you pay monthly, like your utilities, should remain part of your monthly budget.