| I've been using No Thirst's MoneyWell for OSX to manage our family finances over the past six years: http://nothirst.com/moneywell/ The idea of mapping the balances in my accounts (cash, bank account and credit) to a set of buckets ("digital envelopes") really resonates with me. Every paycheque gets assigned to the Salary bucket, and I have a set of fill rules defined to move money from income buckets to expense buckets such as the mortgage, consumables (my version of groceries), kids savings, etc. No money actually moves when the fill rules execute: it's just bucketing. I'm free to "move" the money around manually too. I don't care about the physical mechanism to spend money anymore: cash, credit and debit all have to be assigned to a bucket in the end. (Though I do prefer the credit card for the rewards, and have it automatically paid off in full each month.) Some buckets go negative: when we redid our floors, I "paid" out of the projects bucket, and then "repaid" that amount to myself over the next few months. I didn't borrow any money externally, and kept the overall bank balance well above zero by maintaining a "minimum balance bucket", along with the regular funds in all the other buckets. My wife and I have "personal" buckets - money to spend, or more crucially, to save over a few fill cycles. It's very freeing for both of us. I haven't been terribly successful at getting non-technical folk to use it, because it really requires you to buy into the "bucket" (e.g. digital envelope) system. It also changed ownership a few years back, and development has slowed, though not stalled. |