Many people know that Jesus talked more about money & possessions than he did about anything else. And then there's the famous:
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. - Matthew 6:21
It's one thing to know that your heart will follow your money, but it's another thing to manage your money well enough to ensure your heart is in the right place. Jennifer and I want to do a better job with our budget management. We have our priorities right, but we want to be able to save more and give more outside of planned giving especially when things come up that were not planned on. Our plan up to this point has really been to give first, transfer portions of money to accounts we don't touch, and then live on the rest. But, now we're trying to do a great job budgeting the rest to get the most out of it.
So, we now use mvelopes.com. It's pretty cool. It takes the cash-envelope method and puts it online so you can access it anywhere. It's linked to all of your accounts and knows when transactions come in. You budget how much you want per envelope (mortgage, electric, entertainment, etc) and then assign income to those envelopes based on your budget. Then, you assign debits to the envelope it corresponds to. The traditional cash-envelope method wasn't going to work for us because of how much we use our cards, but this works great.
