Cash Envelopes

The digital envelope system for people who budget with cash — offline, on-device.

The envelope system is older than personal finance software: cash divided into labelled envelopes at the start of the month, and when an envelope is empty that category is done. Its power is that the constraint is physical and immediate rather than a number you check later.

Digitising it keeps the constraint and drops the cash. What it preserves is the part that actually works — spending against a fixed, visible allocation per category, with the discomfort arriving before the purchase rather than at the end of the month when a statement explains what already happened.