How can we get a hold of our finances again, with much less time to spend on accounting and budgeting, due to the arrival of our child?
I have also tried Mvelopes in the past, and my experiences match yours. I currently use the desktop version of YNAB:You Need a Budget (YNAB 4), and I like it much better.  Where we failed after a while with Mvelopes, we are succeeding with YNAB, and have been now for the last 3.5 years. I don't want this to sound like a commercial for YNAB (I will give important caveats about YNAB later), but here is why I believe we have done better now with YNAB than before with Mvelopes.  I hope that these reasons will be useful to you when you are evaluating your next options. As you said, we also found Mvelopes' interface to be slow and glitchy.  YNAB 4 is a desktop app (with synching capabilities) that we found to be much quicker and easier to work with than Mvelopes' Flash-based interface.  (That was 4 years ago; hopefully Mvelopes has redone their interface since then.)   We also struggled with Mvelopes' connection with our banks.  With YNAB 4, there is no connection to the bank: everything has to be entered manually.  I initially thought this might be worse, but for us it has been better.  I can either enter transactions as they happen on the mobile app, or I can hold on to receipts and enter them every day or two in the evening, categorizing as I go.  We always have an up-to-date picture of our finances, and we don't have to mess with trying to match up downloaded transactions that have been screwed up, duplicated, or are missing. We aren't really using YNAB much differently than we were using Mvelopes, but we have learned a few tricks that I think have contributed to our success.  One of the things we do differently is that I don't obsess about the cash accounts too much.  Cash accounts, for us, are the hardest to keep track of, because most of our cash transactions don't have a receipt: we are paying a friend or family member for something, or leaving a tip, or something like that which we forget about when it comes time to enter into the software.  As a result, the cash account balances get off.  I periodically enter a correcting transaction to get the balances right, and have a budget category specifically for this that we have to put money in for these unknown transactions.  Fortunately for us, our cash spending is a small percent of our total spending (we usually pay with a credit card) so this bit of untracked spending isn't that big of a concern. With YNAB, the current month's budget is right in front of you as soon as you open up the app, which makes it easy to adjust your budget during the month, if necessary.  With Mvelopes (at least how their app worked 4 years ago), the budget was somewhat hidden after you funded your budget categories, and it was a bit of a pain to move money around between categories.  The ability to adjust your budget in the middle of the month is crucial; if you don't do that, you'll get frustrated the first time you find that you don't have enough money in a category for something you need.  YNAB makes it very easy to move money around inside your budget. That having been said, you need to be aware that the current version of YNAB is not a desktop application but a web-based app.  YNAB 4, the old desktop version which we have been using, is officially unsupported as of the end of 2016.  However, I see that it is still available for sale, if you are interested in it, the YNAB4 help site is still up, and the mobile app you would need to work with it on your phone (called YNAB Classic) is still in the app store.   As I said, the current YNAB is now a web app, complete with automatic downloading of transactions from your bank.  I have no experience with it (other than playing around with it a little), and so I can't tell you how quick the interface is or how well the auto-downloading of transactions works. As an alternative, another web-based solution is EveryDollar, from Dave Ramsey's company.  (I have never tried it.)  The advantage of this one is that it is free if you choose not to link it to your banks; the automatic downloading of transactions is a paid feature. I wrote an answer a couple of years ago in which I describe two different approaches that budgeting software packages tend to take.  I'm not familiar with Buxfer, so I don't know which approach it takes, but perhaps that answer will help you evaluate all of your software options. On the behavior side of things, besides the relaxing of the cash accounting I mentioned above, we also involve my wife a little less in the budgeting process than we used to.  (This is by her choice!)  I am the one who enters all the transactions into the software (she hands me all her receipts), I reconcile the accounts at the end of the month, and I set the budget for the next month.  We have been doing this long enough now that she knows what the budget is, and we only need to discuss it if we want to do something different with the budget than we have been doing in the past.  She has the YNAB app on her phone and can see where we are at with all of our budget categories. Good question, very well asked! The key here is that you need to find a solution that works for you two without an overt amount of effort.  So in a sense it is somewhat behavior driven, but it is also technology driven.   My wife and I use spreadsheets for both checking account management and budgeting.  A key time saver is that we have a template sheet that gets copied and pasted, then modified for the current month.  Typically 90% of the stuff is the same and each month requires very little modification.  This is one of my problems with EveryDollar.  I have to enter everything each and every month. We also have separate checking accounts and responsibility for different areas of the family expenses.  Doing this risks that we act as roommates, but we both clearly understand the money in one persons account equally belongs to the other and during hard times had to make up for shortfalls on the part of the other. Also we use cash for groceries, eating out, and other day to day expenses.  So we don't have a great need to track expenses or enter transactions. That is what works for us, and it takes us very little time to manage our money.  The budget meeting normally lasts less than a half hour and that includes goal tracking. We kind of live by the 80/20 principle.  We don't see a value in tracking where every dime went.  We see more value in setting and meeting larger financial goals like contributing X amount to retirement and things of that nature.  If we overspent a bit at Walgreens who cares provided the larger goals are meant and we do not incur debt.
Try the following apps/services: Receipt Bank (paid service, gathers paper receipts, scans them and processes the data), I've tested it, and it recognizing receipts very well, taking picture is very quick and easy, then you can upload the expenses into your accounting software by a click or automatically (e.g. FreeAgent), however the service it's a bit expensive. They've apps for Android and iPhone. Expentory (app and cloud-based service for capturing expense receipts on the move), Happened with my family. My wife could not work for an extended period after birth of our first child. At the same time I was injured and due to the injury the doctor would not release me to return to the same position so I was let go. It was a good paying job at the time. To top it all off if we both picked up minimum wage jobs working we lost all food benefits and could pay our bills but not afford food. We also had to work around each others and our parents schedules so we had someone to watch our baby. If we were paying 100+ a week for childcare while working we would have been starved. Option three is our preferred method, and we never argue about money. First we did a budget to work out ALL monthly joint out-goings (mortgage, bills, grocery etc). Then we each agreed who would pay what into the joint or household account - at the moment, I earn more than my wife, so I pay more, but we sit down every three or four months, to see if it needs adjusting. This way, we each keep our own individual accounts private, but pay what is necessary into the household account. We also set up a joint savings account; often at the end of the month, we'll have a little extra left in the household acount, and we siphon that off into joint savings to cover future unexpected costs - looks like our tumble dryer is on its last spin cycle at the moment, for example, and the joint savings account will be able to cover the cost of replacement. it all takes a bit of administration - but, as I say, we've never had a cross word about money, so the system seems to work. "With regard to worries about ownership:  I'll point you towards this - The Cohabitants Rights Bill currently in First Reading at the House of Lords. Without a date for even the second reading yet. In short the Bill is attempting to redress is the lack of rights when a non-married relationship ends when compared to married relationships; that is that one of the ""cohabitants"" can end up with basically nothing that they don't have their name on. So currently you're in the clear and (Part 2) Section 6.2.a says the Bill cannot be used retroactively against you if your relationship is over before it becomes law (I expect with Brexit etc, this Bill isn't a high priority - it's been a year since the first reading). Section 6.2.a: This Part does not apply to former cohabitants        where the former cohabitants have ceased living together as a        couple before the commencement date;    However, if you're still together if/when this Bill becomes Law then basically all of (Part 1) Section 2 may be relevant as it notes the conditions you will fall into this bill: Section 2.1.a: live together as a couple and Section 2.2.d: have lived together as a couple for a continuous        period of three years or more. and the ""have lived together"" at that point counts from the start of your cohabitation, not the start of the Bill being law:  Section 2.4.a: For the purposes of subsection (2)(d), in determining        the length of the continuous period during which two people have lived       together as a couple - any period of the relationship that fell before        the commencement date (of the Bill) is to be taken into account If you have kids at some point, you'd also fall under 2.2.a through 2.2.c too. After that, the financial parity decided upon by the court depends on a whole bunch of conditions as outlined in the Bill, but Section 8.1.b is pretty clear: Section 8.1.b: (b)the court is satisfied either—       (i)that the respondent has retained a benefit; or       (ii)40that the applicant has an economic disadvantage,       as a result of qualifying contributions the applicant has made I'm not qualified to say whether your partner helping to pay off your mortgage in lieu of paying rent herself would count as just paying rent or giving you an economic benefit. Sections 12, 13, and 14 discuss opt-outs, also worth a read. The a major disclaimer here in that Bills at this early stage have the potential to be modified, scrapped and/or replaced making this info incorrect. As an additional read, here's an FT article from Feb 2016 discussing this lack of rights of a cohabitant which should alleviate any current concerns." "I hear you (and those answering) use the words ""my money"" (or ""me to pay for stuff"") The sooner that ends, the better off you'll both be. My wife and I do have our own checking accounts that we maintain so she can write a check without notifying me, or I can buy her a birthday/mother's day/ etc gift without it showing in the joint account, but nearly all money flows through our joint account. Before we were married, the joint bank accounts were opened as was the joint brokerage account.  You need to work on the budget as a single project and without judging. It's good that your incomes are similar, it makes the dynamics of pooling seem more fair, but for those where one spouse is making far more than the other, the impulse to 'chip in' equally towards bills leaves the lower earner with nothing.  Will your wife go back to work after a maternity leave? Once she's back, and working for a time, things will settle down a bit. There's a postpartum time that's difficult. Women who have been through it will tell you that it can be pretty bad, and the best a guy can do is be understanding and supportive. As long as you are talking ""we"" with your wife, she'll see that you are both in it together. At the risk of sounding sexist, Women's clothing needs are different than men's. I could get away with owning 5 suits which could be replaced at the rate of one per year. If not for my wife, I can see in my own daughter how clothing makes her feel good about herself, and while I'm frugal with most of our budget, my clothing questions are 2 - Will it last? & Will it match other pieces you have? Therefore, clothing gets a line item all its own in the budget.  There are a number of financial things to consider, but I see you are in the UK, so I'll generalize. In the States, there are pretax benefits to help care for a child under 13 (called a dependent care account) and for medical expenses not covered by insurance (called flexible spending account). These let you take money from your pay pretax to use for specific expenses. If UK offers similar, I invite a user to edit the detail into my answer.  Last - once the kid comes into our lives, there's little room for many of the late teen/early 20's spending. Comics? DVDs? Those are the low hanging fruit of wasted money. Saving for retirement, and for University for the kid take priority.  I'm not one to quote cliches but a friend once offered this observation - ""If you are not happy but your wife is happy, you are still far happier than if you were happy but your wife is not happy.""" I think this varies considerably depending on your situation.  I've heard people say 6 month's living expenses, and I know Suze Orman recommended bumping that to 8 months in our current economy. My husband and I have no children, lots of student loan debts, but we pay off our credit cards in full each month and are working to save up for a house.  We've talked through a few different what-if scenarios.  If one of us were to lose our job, we have savings to cover the difference between our reduced income and paying the bills for 6 or 8 months while the other person regained employment.  If both of us were to lose our jobs simultaneously, our savings wouldn't hold us over for more than 3 or 4 months, but if that were to happen, we would likely take advantage of the opportunity to relocate closer to our families, and possibly even move in to my parent's house for a short time.  With no children and no mortgage, our commitments are few, so I don't feel the need to have a very large emergency cash fund, especially with student loans to pay off. Think through a few scenarios for your life and see what you would need.  Take into consideration expenses to break a rental lease, cell phone contract, or other commitments.  Then, start saving toward your goal. Also see answers to a similar question here. Not in the long term, of course not.  But take a cross-country flight in coach, after the normal check-in process at your destination, stress over a lost bag or two, and then with no turnaround time deliver an address, run a meeting, or work with sensitive materials.  As others have pointed out, an hour or two of coach isn't going to dramatically impact one's ability to do that although the flight could very well leave a sour taste in one's mouth if you had a baby screaming through most of it or some other adversity that could have been avoided if you flew business/first. "The trick to using a credit card responsibly is accounting. With your old system, you were paying for everything out of your savings account.  Everytime you had an expense, it was immediately withdrawn from your savings account, and you saw how much money you had left. Now, with a credit card, there isn't any money being withdrawn from your savings account until a month later, when you have a huge credit card bill. The trick is to treat every credit card transaction as if it was a debit card transaction, and subtract the money from your ""available funds"" on paper immediately.  Then you'll know how much money you actually have to spend (not by looking at your bank statement, but by looking at your ""available funds"" number), and when the credit card bill comes, you'll have money sitting there waiting to go to the credit card company. This requires more work than you had with your old system, and if it sounds like too much work, you might be better off with a debit card or cash.  But if you want to continue to use the credit card, you'll find that the right software will make the accounting process easier.  I like YNAB, but there are other software products that work as well.  Just make sure that your system accounts for each credit card transaction as it is spent, deducting the amount from your budget now, so that there is money set aside for the credit card bill.  Software that simply categorizes your spending after the fact is not as useful." Since this post was migrated from Parenting, my reply was in the context where it appeared to be misrepresenting facts to make a point. I've edited it to be more concise to my main point. In my opinion, the best way to save for your childs future is to get rid of as much of your own debt as possible. Starting today. For the average American, a car is 6-10%. Most people have at least a couple credit cards, ranging from 10-25% (no crap). College loans can be all over the map (5-15%) as can be signature (8-15%) or secured bank loans (4-8%). Try to stop living within your credit and live within your means. Yeah it will suck to not go to movies or shop for cute things at Kohl's, but only today.  First, incur no more debt. Then, the easiest way I found to pay things off is to use your tax returns and reduce your cable service (both potentially $Ks per year) to pay off a big debt like a car or student loan. You just gave yourself an immediate raise of whatever your payment is. If you think long term (we're talking about long-term savings for a childs college) there are things you can do to pay off debt and save money without having to take up a 2nd job... but you have to think in terms of years, not months. Is this kind of thing pie in the sky? Yes and no, but it takes a plan and diligence. For example, we have no TV service (internet only service redirected an additional $100/mo to the wifes lone credit card) and we used '12 taxes to pay off the last 4k on the car. We did the same thing on our van last year. It takes willpower to not cheat, but that's only really necessary for the first year-ish... well before that point you'll be used to the Atkins Diet on your wallet and will have no desire to cheat. It doesn't really hurt your quality of life (do you really NEED 5 HBO channels?) and it sets everyone up for success down the line. The moral of the story is that by paying down your debt today, you're taking steps to reduce long haul expenditures. A stable household economy is a tremendous foundation for raising children and can set you up to be more able to deal with the costs of higher ed. You can take a shortcut and make a few cumulative transactions, maybe just estimate how much of your spending landed in each of your budget categories, but you will lose a lot of the value that you were building for yourself by tracking your spending during the earlier months. I reconcile my budget and categorize my spending on a monthly basis. It's always a chore to pull out the big stack of receipts and plow through them, but I've learned the value of having an accurate picture of where all my money went. There is no clean way to fake it. You can either take the time and reconcile your spending, or you can take a short cut. It probably renders your efforts to track everything from the beginning of the year invalid though. If you want to start over this month (as you did at the beginning of the year) that would probably be a cleaner way to reconcile things. There is one way to make money quickly. If you are married and both are over 50 and you can put money into a deductible IRA for 2014. The $5,500 contribution  and $1,000 catch-up per person would allow the family to make a contribution of $13,000. If they are in the 25% tax bracket the $3,250 drop in their taxes would allow them to get a $325 bonus from their tax software.  Of course they would have already had to be getting a refund before the IRA contribution, or the new refund and bonus would be smaller. They would have had to meet all the program rules. And they must have a combination of 401Ks and AGI to allow deductible contributions.  This would drastically shorten the initial loan period. Did you account for college? That's 40k per year in tuition alone. Also I'm not sure you accounted that the number included income forgone, as in if they weren't taking care of the kids they could've been earning more money. The article says the cost to *parents* is 900,000 per kid, but that doesn't mean the parents are actually spending 900,000 per kid.   Lots of other things to account for...a couple w/o kids doesn't need to get a 4-bedroom house for example. Does your co-worker own a house? Did you account for the cost of ownership? We aim to keep 6 months of expenses. The rationale is that its enough time to recover from most serious illnesses (that you can recover from) or a redundancy or pay for a large unexpected problem not covered by the insurance (e.g. the boiler dying). It also gives us enough time to reorganise finances if needed. For example we could get out of contracts (like mobile phones, sky TV), sell the car, and maybe even find a cheaper house if needed in that time. It will take a good chunk of time to build up that amount and it's worth considering how many commitments you have (kids, wife, mortgage, car...) as the fewer you have the less you need. If you have fewer commitments you can be comfortable with much less contingency. When I lived in rented accomodation and didn't run a car or have many possessions, I just maintained enough cash to cover my bills for about 6 weeks, this would give me enough time to find another job, and if I didn't get one I could always crash round a friend's house. "All of these answers are great but I wanted to add one piece of advice from someone who has been married 8 years and been in various financial ""situations."" Have one of you (whoever the two of you feel is more organized and more financially responsible) be solely in charge of paying the monthly bills, but keep a spreadsheet or some other tracking mechanism so that the other can monitor this as well. That way if you guys ever decide to switch roles there won't be much of a learning curve. Also, don't do three bank accounts. One or two is enough, more than that starts becoming more difficult to keep track of and if you have any sort of monthly fees on the accounts it also wastes money. My wife and I each have our own account and we get money for each other if necessary. She handles paying the bills but keeps a monthly spreadsheet that has all pertinent info. We have a number and color coding system to determine which paycheck (1st or 2nd of the month) the bill is paid in and whether it has been paid, not paid, or past due (green, yellow, red). Hopefully you don't ever have to see the red color :P" This is the same as any case where income is variable.  How do you deal with the months where expected cash flows are lower than projected? When I got married, my wife was in the habit of allocating money to be spent in the current month from income accrued during the previous month.  This is slightly complicated because we account for taxes (and benefit expenses) withheld in the current months' paychecks as current expenses, but we allocate the gross income from that check to the following month for spending. The benefit of spending only money made during the previous month is that income shocks are less shocking.  I was working for a start-up and they missed payroll that normally arrived on the first of the month.  Most of my co-workers were calling the bank in a panic to avoid over-draft fees with their mortgage payments, but my mortgage payment was already covered.  Similarly, when the same start-up had a reduction in force on the first day of a new quarter, I didn't have to pull any money from savings during the 3 weeks I was unemployed. In the end, you're going to have to allocate money to the budget based on the actual income--which is lower than your expectations.  What part of the budget should fairly be reduced is a question you and your wife will have to figure out.