Cash Envelopes: The What and Why

Hey, good morning, everybody! Welcome to Coffee Chats with Candice! Grab your cup of coffee; which I have mine, and I overfilled it so I wouldn't run out of coffee. But grab your cup of coffee and/or a beverage of your choice and join me for Cash Envelopes: What They Are and How to Use Them. 

So cash envelopes — what happens is that this is the old way that our grandparents, or some of you may be watching your great-grandparents, used to use their money because back then they didn't have credit cards or whatever.

Cash envelopes today are used for categories that we overspend on.

For example, groceries: a lot of people will overspend on groceries, and they don't even realize it and that reducing that in your budget can help you so much.

Find fund money that's already there in your budget that you didn't know you had.

It also helps with eating out. I use it for our doctor visits so that if I put it in my cash envelope at the beginning of the month, then it will be there at the end of the month (the doctor's appointments at the end of the month) and I don't have it in my bank. Maybe I used everything, or maybe something accidentally happened and I had to use my debit card and the money came out, so I always have those kind of things

Or I use it for my monthly vet bills for the dogs and their medicine, I count that as cash. I do my fuel in cash, and what I do with that is I buy a gift card and put my fuel budget in there for the month. That way, I know that the fuel is always there, and I can't run out of it, and I can't run out of money in the bank.

Let me show you what a cash envelope is. So this is a cash envelope and this one is just a little bound one and so you could put the money in here and then it works like a check register. 

Let me give you this little example here: you just put your information in there. And so you would add money from your paycheck at the beginning of the month, make the deposit and then carry down the balance. Then each time you use it, you deduct the amount and you put what it's for. 

This is just for food – it's anything that you do related to food 

Once you've run out of money for the month, you don't spend any more, your spending is over. So you want to make sure that you pay attention to your budget, it will help you control your spending, rather than just having your debit card and especially having a credit card, we want to put those aside and not use them anymore because it gets us into trouble. 

So you want to do that and that will help you so much – you won't even believe how much it will help you!  

That's what I want you to do this week—I want to see what categories you can use your cash envelopes for. 

Even before I got those cash envelopes, I used regular envelopes and just wrote on them. It wasn't as convenient, but it got me started, so that was good for me. 

We're actually trying to come up with our own cash envelope and hopefully get that out soon, so that way it helps. 

The other thing is to take the "What does your money say about you?" quiz and see what your money says about you (it will be linked in the caption). 

Also, make sure to join me here next week at 10am for the next live. 

Hope you have a great day. I'll see you later!