Review of Mvelopes Budgeting App and Website

In this video, I will review the budgeting app and website Mvelopes. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of budget apps.

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Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I will review the budgeting app and website Mvelopes. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of budget apps.

Mvelopes is a budgeting website and app. It has been a around for a while -- long enough that the most recent iteration is called Mvelopes 5. It allows you to link your financial accounts to the software to pull in transactions. It is not free -- there is a free trial period, but after that, you'll need to choose from one of their three price points -- $6 per month gets you essentially just access to the budgeting software, $10 per month gets you more learning and debt management tools, and $19 per month comes with a quarterly meeting with a financial coach.

I've used a variety of budgeting apps over my adulthood. Most recently, I've switched over from using Mint for many years to YNAB. That said, I'm always open to checking out other budgeting apps that may work better for me, for my financial mentoring clients, or for my subscribers. One caveat is that I've only been trying Mvelopes out for a couple of weeks, so my comments will reflect that -- all interfaces get easier once you've been using them for a while. Okay -- first let's talk about the

Set-up Process
I had some issues setting up. I was trying to do it entirely through my phone, but it kept freezing on a certain screen, so I ended up having to go through the website to complete the process. Obviously, this is just a one time thing, but it was annoying enough that if I hadn't been determined, it could have lost them a customer. I really only wanted to put my credit card account in as my linked account, but Mvelopes requires a bank account with a positive balance before it will let you go forward. This is the only software I've come across that has required that. That shouldn't be a problem for most people; however, some folks would rather enter some accounts in manually (meaning not linked) and it won't let you do that either. The account HAS to be linked so that Mvelopes can automatically download transactions. The set up process seems to funnel you directly into funding your budget categories, which weren't the right ones for my needs. I would have preferred an opportunity to set up budget categories that work better for my household before hitting the funding process, but I was able to escape out of that.

Now that I've gone through the set up process, let's talk a little about the Mvelopes

Interface
There are lots of budget apps that are fashioned after the old money in physical envelopes system that people used to use to control their spending. EveryDollar and YNAB are both basically envelope systems. But Mvelopes makes this metaphor the most explicit (as you can see by the name) and as a result, I think they make it easier to understand the budgeting concepts. If you want to see your budget, you click on Envelopes and each budget line item has a little envelope icon next to it. This helps you to understand that you are putting cash into envelopes in the app. I also really like the way that Mvelopes deals with imported transactions that haven't been approved or categorized yet. It holds them in an Inbox. If you are using the app on your phone, this is the first screen that you see. This is great since budgeters spend the majority of their time on the app categorizing transactions. Other apps make you click through a variety of screens to get to this OR, even worse, they don't separate those new transactions from others, so you have to go through all of them to weed out the ones that need categories. The inbox makes this simple and easy. The home screen shows you how much money you still have to put into envelopes -- they call that your Unallocated Money, your most recent transactions, the balance of your linked accounts, and your envelopes -- which is what they call your budget view. So, let's talk about how they set up your budget. First,

Budget line items
As I said before -- these are called envelopes. I set this all up using the website view, but it's a little easier using the phone app. Changing and creating new budget items is kind of annoying. The process for editing one of their existing envelope details takes something like 8 clicks to get to the right place. It also takes 7 clicks to delete an envelope. Theoretically, once you get these all set up, you don't have interact with this process much, but it is tedious.

[jamesflynn]

Nice review, really appreciate the effort you have put into this series!

[adamyost]

Mvelopes is/was amazing. The best system out there BY FAR. Changed my life. Easy to use and I know where every dollar is. Now Mvelopes is closing and there is nothing out there that is as good. But YNAB might work. EveryDollar was the replacement recommended by Mvelopes, but EveryDollar (so far) has been very confusing to use as an envelope system.

[fififinance]

Money saving should be approached as an optimisation strategy and work on the three biggest categories housing, food and travel. My vice is pizza so now I have a pizza budget.👍