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Budgeting with envelopes

What this solves

Plan’s Budget view is zero-based, envelope-style budgeting: every dollar of on-budget cash gets assigned to an envelope before you spend it, so you always know what’s free versus already spoken for — not just what you spent.

Assign your money

  1. Open Plan; it opens on Budget.
  2. Ready to Assign (RTA): on-budget cash, minus what’s assigned this month and reserved for the future, minus last month’s unresolved overspending. Click for the breakdown by source.
  3. Edit an envelope’s Assigned amount directly, or auto-assign — fund all targets, cover all overspending, match what you assigned or spent last month, use an average, or reset everything to zero — to propose moves you review in a preview before applying.
  4. Each envelope shows Assigned, Activity, and Available — Available rolls over month to month.
  5. Set a target (monthly, weekly, yearly, or by date) so auto-assign knows how much to propose.
  6. Group and rename envelopes from Manage categories; the “Others” group is the one catch-all a category can’t be deleted into, so nothing is ever orphaned.

Cash flow projection

The Cash Flow sub-tab projects account balances forward from recurring income/expenses — actual months on the left, projected continuing right. Use What-if to try a scenario without touching your real plan, apply a preset, or export as CSV.

What Lucius can do here

  • Assign or move money between envelopes, run auto-assign and explain what it proposed.
  • Create, rename, merge, or delete envelopes; set or update a target.
  • Explain why Ready to Assign changed or an envelope shows overspent.
  • Reason about a what-if cash-flow scenario in conversation.

Things that trip people up

  • Overspending reduces next month’s Ready to Assign — carried forward, not forgiven.
  • Only on-budget accounts feed Ready to Assign — an off-budget account counts toward net worth but never appears in the budget.
  • A foreign-currency transaction inside a budgeted transfer locks its value at the transaction date — same historical-rate lock as the ledger generally.
  • A split line assigned to Ready to Assign is correctly counted — some budgeting tools lose this money; this one tracks it.
  • Cash flow is a projection, not a guarantee — it extrapolates from recurring streams you and Lucius have identified; a one-off you haven’t entered won’t be in it.