Do you have a Budgeting Method that you really stick to each month that you can truly follow? What is it? I’m struggling. SOS!
If you’re U.K. you can try HyperJar and splitting your money with that
If you’re in the USA I’d recommend YNAB (you need a budget)
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@Joel has a great one. I think he can add his 2 cents. 
Hey @macee_girl 
I have what some would say a quite complicated budgeting method but I like it so 
I have 6 checking/current accounts and 5 savings accounts with a different bank.
Checking/Current Accounts
- Food - Groceries
- Household Bills - Electricity & gas, water, internet, local taxes etc
- Personal Bills - Phone bill, Spotify, charity, rent etc
- Personal Care - Haircuts, gym, protein etc
- Travel - Commute costs
- Day-to-day - Leftover money
Savings Accounts
- Long term savings
- Christmas presents
- Birthday
- Trips home
- Rainy day - I use this account if something a little more expensive
When I’m paid, I have automatic payments/standing orders to all these accounts. For example, when I’m paid every month, £160 is automatically transferred to my food account, £33 to Christmas presents etc
This means that before I can spend my pay, all my costs & savings are already covered. If I want to buy groceries, I use my ‘Food’ account card. If I want to pay for a haircut, I use my ‘Personal Care’ card. I now use my Curve card which merges all my cards into one but before that I would write on each card with a marker so I knew what they were in my wallet.
My ‘Day-to-day’ card is my spending money after all my savings and committed spending has been removed. I know exactly how much I have to play with every month.
Every 6 months I sit down and re-evaluate whether my budgets help or hinder my long-term goals.
If you haven’t switched off already, I hope that helps!
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I’ve a fairly basic approach.
40-45% on bills
40-45% on food, entertainment, etc
10-20% on savings, rainy day, holidays, etc
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I don’t have a budgeting method myself. I use Oval to save 10p everytime i do 1000 steps with Google Fit. It also rounds up to the nearest £1 when i use my bank card, and saves the difference. Squirrel also looks good, if you don’t mind paying £9.99 every month that money is deposited into your virtual Squirrel account.
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Have you ever tried Squirrel?
I use(d) it for budgeting but have never transfered funds.
I’ve just opened it & got the pictured message
“Squirrel is pausing to relaunch a brand new app. Please withdraw all funds by Oct 20th! Join the queue now to get an exclusive invite to the new app:”
Interesting!
Screenshot_20190928-151455_Squirrel|243x500
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Woah!!! Awesome!! I will look at this!
I’m in the US so I have US integrations
Awesome. 
I use a similar method to Joel but using starling pots. At the start of the month I have a standing order to savings and all my scheduled expenses go into pots for groceries, entertainment, utilities etc and then when a bill goes out from the current account I transfer it back from the pot. It keeps the current account with a low balance so there’s no temptation to overspend.
@AndyM Do you not find it annoying to have to manually transfer back into your current account?
Also, what if your balances falls below the amount of your bill?
with starling the transfer back to the main account is very fast and easy. Anything saved in goals is offset against the overdraft too so it’s only if the total of the entire account goes overdrawn do you get charged any interest.
The downside of the convenience is you don’t get a decent interest on the savings. Which is where Emma could help. If I could push off items I’m budgeting for annually to a single higher interest account but still segregate it into virtual pots so I know what it’s all for that would be great.
This is mostly for my day to day budgeting though so there’s never a huge amount in starling goals.
@AndyM Those smart cookies over at Starling have thought of everything 
Don’t you think having virtual pots would confuse someone rather than separate accounts? What would happen if they removed a large portion from that savings account?
That’s a good point. I’m not sure how that could be handled on the Emma side of things. The bigger picture goal is a way of tracking what all the money in a single account is for. It’s not appealing having to create separate physical accounts and some institutions don’t support multiple accounts of the same type or have min/max limits that would mean it wouldn’t work.
Ideally Starling would just pay the highest interest rate in their goals 
Did you open all 6 accounts with the same bank?
Also I’m new as in Joined today - I get various incomes throughout the month, I have set my biggest one as the main payday but I have other income too how do I budget that so Emma recognises it instead of going from the main one to main one.
Thanks
Lisa (newbi)
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I would budget by calendar month, instead of payday to payday. 
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For ease, I do have the 6 accounts with the same bank