Envelope budgeting in plain words

Money comes in (Maya's paycheque on a Friday, or one of Jordan's invoices) and is added to Ready to assign, the number at the top of the budget. It is not a bank balance. It is money that has not been given a purpose yet.

Giving it a job means assigning it to an envelope: $2,310 to Mortgage, $991.95 to Groceries, $250 to Dining out, $250 to Japan 2027. When Ready to assign reads $0, every dollar the Reyes household has is assigned to something. That is the point of the method. It is not about spending less; it is about never being surprised by a bill you didn't plan for.

Between the two is the cashflow chart. It shows how much is safe to spend before the next paycheque, and your balance over the month ahead; the cashflow guide explains it in full. The budget tells you what your money is for, and the chart tells you whether your account will have enough on the day each bill comes out. If you would rather see the budget on its own, the way YNAB shows it, press Hide this chart above the chart. You can bring it back in Settings, under Account, with Cashflow on Budget.

Across the top of the budget, under the month, Mintro also checks your envelopes against your bank accounts until your next pay. Your bank can be short of what the envelopes hold: a purchase nobody has filed has left the bank but not an envelope, a bill can come out before the paycheque arrives, and spending can run past what its envelope has left. Here the panel says that $3.01 of spending due before the October 30 pay has no envelope money behind it, most of it in Fun money, and under that it shows the three figures: what is not in the bank today, what is due before the pay with no envelope money behind it, and the lowest your bank balance gets. When the chart shows a plan, the check follows that plan and the line starts with its name. Fix my envelopes lists the money moves that would back every envelope, for you to tick and confirm, and See why on Cashflow opens the full check. When everything is covered the panel is plain, and you can hide its figures for the month.

Every envelope shows four figures for the month: what was carried in from last month, what was assigned this month, the activity (the purchases filed into it, meaning put into it), and what is available now. Available is the one that matters when you are standing in the store deciding whether you can buy something.

A target is how much you mean to put in. Groceries has a target of $900 a month. The Emergency fund has a target of a $15,000 balance, however long that takes. Japan has a target of $8,000 by October 2027, so Mintro works out how much that needs each month and shows whether this month has it. A target never moves money by itself; it only tells you whether you have put in what you planned.

The pill's colour tells you the envelope's state: funded (it has what its target asks for), underfunded (it still needs more), or overspent (more was spent than it held). Overspent is the one you need to act on, and the guide on covering overspending explains how.

If you have applied a plan on Cashflow, such as spending $60 less on groceries until a date, the envelope it touches says so under its name, with how it is going: on track, ahead of the plan, or over it. The Reyes household's current plan, Tighter November, asks for less on Groceries, Dining out and Fun money. Groceries and Fun money are ahead of the plan, and Dining out is over it. Open the envelope to read the whole promise; the cashflow guide explains plans.

Whatever is left in Groceries on the 31st is still there on the 1st, shown as carried in. An envelope you overspent carries that over too, as a negative amount, until you cover it. There is no reset at the start of a month and nothing is wiped clean. September starts with whatever August ended with.

This is why the Emergency fund can have a balance as its target: it fills up over many months. It is also why Dining out can be $62.40 over late in the month without the month being ruined. You cover the $62.40 from another envelope and carry on.

The routine work of a budget is putting each purchase in its envelope, splitting a Costco receipt between Groceries and Kids, and matching the mortgage payment to the mortgage. ChatGPT, Claude, or Kimi does that work once you connect it to Mintro. You open the app when you want to see where things stand. Reports show where each month's money went, by category and by envelope, using the same envelopes.