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Open Net Worth Docs

Envelopes and budgeting

Open Net Worth’s budgeting model — the Plan tab — is zero-based: every dollar gets assigned a job, and the app shows exactly how much is still unassigned. Familiar if you’ve used YNAB; here’s the mental model if you haven’t.

Envelopes aren’t categories

A category is a label on a transaction. An envelope is a pot of money with its own name, group, and (optionally) a savings target — kept deliberately separate. Several categories can feed one envelope (Coffee, Takeout, and Restaurants can all count against “Dining Out”) without merging the categories themselves, and an envelope can exist with no linked category at all — used for things like “the pot that pays off my credit card,” which isn’t a spending category.

Gotcha: a category you’ve labeled but never linked to an envelope isn’t neutral — spending in it pulls straight out of Ready to Assign, same as unbudgeted money spent directly. Link it to an envelope, or its spending shows up as an unexpected drop in what’s unassigned.

Ready to Assign

Ready to Assign (RTA) is money you haven’t given a job yet — every dollar in an on-budget account is either resting in an envelope (assigned) or sitting in RTA (unassigned). Income raises RTA; assigning to an envelope lowers it by exactly that much. Spending never touches RTA — it only moves money out of whichever envelope it’s categorized into.

Assigning vs. moving money

Assigning puts new RTA money into an envelope for the month. Moving money shifts money between two envelopes, or between an envelope and RTA — pulling back into RTA is capped at what the envelope currently holds (you can’t unassign money already spent), but funding an envelope from RTA can push RTA negative, same as assigning can.

What happens when you overspend

Spend more than an envelope holds and its balance goes negative — visibly, not silently corrected or auto-borrowed from another envelope. At month-end a negative balance doesn’t carry over as debt; it’s absorbed into that month’s Ready to Assign, so you start clean. A positive leftover balance rolls forward and stays available.

Targets

An envelope can carry a savings target, and how “progress” is measured depends on which flavor you pick:

  • Set aside — progress is what you’ve assigned this month; it stays “funded” even after you spend it.
  • Fill up to — progress is your rollover plus this month’s assignment; spending doesn’t reopen the goal until next month refills it automatically.
  • Set aside by [date] — progress is everything you’ve contributed across all months to date; spending never sets a dated goal back.
  • Have a balance of — progress is your envelope’s current balance, a true savings pot where spending genuinely does set you back.

Credit cards, automatically

An on-budget credit card gets its own payment envelope automatically. Spend on the card in a budgeted category and the money you’d normally spend from cash moves into the card’s payment envelope instead — so by statement time, the money to pay it is already set aside; paying the card is just moving that envelope’s balance out. Pre-existing card debt, or spending in an unbudgeted category, isn’t auto-funded this way — it shows up as underfunded on the payment row rather than quietly inflating available cash.

Commitments

A commitment is a dated obligation — a purchase plan, loan repayment, installment schedule — more structured than a plain envelope. Every active commitment with money still owed gets its own funding envelope automatically, kept in sync with what’s due next. Commitments are their own concept; this page covers only how they show up in your budget.