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This is gonna sound crazy… but at some point I stopped trying to budget because my SO and I couldn’t find anything that worked for both of us. My wife wanted to

This is gonna sound crazy… but at some point I stopped trying to budget because my SO and I couldn’t find anything that worked for both of us. My wife wanted to do the envelope method, but it ended up where she would basically leave the envelopes in her purse and I was dependent on her for any purchase. We switched to YNAB for a little while, but my wife would never enter transactions consistently so I would always end up making one large adjustment at the end of every month. Ultimately this is what we do now: all routine bills/savings/short and long obligations get paid or deposited first, and there is usual only around a potential $100 variation in those numbers each month. So that ends up being a magic number that we both know we need as a minimum. Outside of that, we basically use our joint credit card account for everything else. When it gets close to a certain number we both stop any unnecessary spending until the next billing cycle and then we pay it off entirely. So far we have maybe hit that number three or four times in the last two years? It gives us a high level view of our spending and we don’t get in the weeds about “can we get this” or stress about every dollar being correctly utilized. If we realize that we can’t afford something we either plan for it during the next billing cycle, or dip into savings if we need it urgently. We don’t leave each other in the dark on any of this though. We both get a notification on every transaction we make, and we’re both very transparent on our purchases. I’m not going to recommend you follow my method, but so far it works pretty well for us.

ryandrake 5y ago
This is basically what we do, too. We use a single joint credit card for all purchases and as many bills that can accept credit cards (this is the USA so most of my bills only accept ancient paper check technology). I track the CC balance twice weekly against two thresholds: We have a yellow dollar value that indicates “caution, limit the rest of the month to essential spending” and a red value that is a “do not exceed.” Then pay entire balance from bank account on the due date. Our red “stop spending” value is about 1/20th of our credit limit. Paying exclusively with credit has benefits: 1. Zero interest float for up to 30 days (till next payment due) and 2. Credit card-specific rewards (cash back or airline miles, etc.) Thinks like retirement, savings and investment, health insurance, umbrella liability, come out of paycheck before even hitting the bank account (Pay Yourself First rule). We aim for zero in the bank account at all times as it pays nearly zero interest.
- iambateman 5y ago
  This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing! We keep our bank account higher than zero in order to avoid thinking about it, but I think we do a lot of similar stuff to y’all.
iambateman 5y ago
This is really helpful, thanks. Like I wrote in the OP, we used YNAB for a bit and it just got too complicated.

ryandrake 5y ago

This is basically what we do, too. We use a single joint credit card for all purchases and as many bills that can accept credit cards (this is the USA so most of my bills only accept ancient paper check technology). I track the CC balance twice weekly against two thresholds: We have a yellow dollar value that indicates “caution, limit the rest of the month to essential spending” and a red value that is a “do not exceed.” Then pay entire balance from bank account on the due date. Our red “stop spending” value is about 1/20th of our credit limit. Paying exclusively with credit has benefits: 1. Zero interest float for up to 30 days (till next payment due) and 2. Credit card-specific rewards (cash back or airline miles, etc.) Thinks like retirement, savings and investment, health insurance, umbrella liability, come out of paycheck before even hitting the bank account (Pay Yourself First rule). We aim for zero in the bank account at all times as it pays nearly zero interest.

iambateman 5y ago
This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing! We keep our bank account higher than zero in order to avoid thinking about it, but I think we do a lot of similar stuff to y’all.

iambateman 5y ago

This is really helpful, thanks. Like I wrote in the OP, we used YNAB for a bit and it just got too complicated.