How to Manage a Cashless Lifestyle

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Need a cashless budgeting system that will be the 2020 decade budgeting method with more touchless payment methods and debit cards. Keeping germs away with using cashless budgeting! Cash will it be a thing of the past like Checks…we can thank Covid-19. We want to share with you two apps that will help you cashless budget and of course our yearly bullet budget journal. We will let you determine which is better to budget with as a cashless budget. It will be your strategic thinking for the week.

Mint.com

First I want to share with you Mint.com, this is the platform that I have used since 2014 and before. I have both pros and cons being a user and even seeing if I should switch to use other platforms myself.

Pros

Mint.com I love being able to link up all my accounts from checking, savings, credit cards, debts, HSA, retirement accounts, and loans. This has made transitioning from single to married super easy to communicate with money and budget quickly if you run out of time during the week. It also shows if you have spent to much money in one budgeting category or if you are running close on your budget. This is a super neat feature! Especially, when my husband realized how much money we were spending at Kroger from $1 – $3 transactions!

Another feature I love to use is the net worth feature. It shows me in an instant what my net worth is and whether it is growing or declining! How neat is this! I love how when you pay debt is it increasing your net worth! Kill that debt so compound interest isn’t affecting that net worth!

As you all know I love anything free, cheap, discount, or a darn good deal especially if it is on my wish list. This app is free, which in my books is a win!

Other features include investment tracking which is important when you get out of debt or even if you are in debt and want to start small and invest. I did invest when I was getting out of my student loan debt because I knew about compound interest and as a twenty year old I wanted to see how my money grew!

If you are not into the sitting down and physically writing down your spending, mint.com provides an easy way to track spending with a pie chart. It will break it down by week, month, year, and several years. Yes, you can find out how much money you can save on coffee without getting Starbucks everyday! This is a true fact for me. I spent way too much on Starbucks coffee in college and saw the savings instantly when I found mint.com!

The other bonus point it has to offer is it send you weekly updates on spending sent as a reminder plus paycheck and bill reminders! Yes, who doesn’t like a good reminder of how good you are doing on your personal finances? I know I love when we have a zero spend week and the app only shows me that we spent money on bills such as rent, phones, and insurance.

The last benefit I am going to share with you that we use is the free credit score. This is only a tiny benefit as most banks now offer this as well, but I like comparing mint.com verse my bank and you can do that too!

Cons

Now for the first negative, which is more annoying than anything. Is that bank accounts often get unlinked and you have to synchronize again. This is a technology issue that they have had for a long time.

Another negative, is that when you link checking accounts, often your consumer spending does not receive the correct category of spending. For example, say you went to Burger King it did not link it to Fast Food, but it was placed under Restaurants. This is an easy fix on your end, but it is inconvenient. I usually look at my spending categories once a week/biweekly and update any that are incorrect. This helps me during tax season for an easy and simple free way to give my tax account my spending information for my business/giving.

I shared with you the pros and cons of mint.com and no I do not have any affiliation with them, but have loved using them during my personal finance journey.

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Everydollar

Now let’s cover Everydollar by Dave Ramsey pros and cons. I have to admit I tried this budgeting app because I took his class in college for free through my sorority. This does go against Dave Ramsey as he does believe in using cash for his budget, however we are in a new day and age! We have access to apps, Apple Pay, and so much more! You will still be able to budget your cashless lifestyle with his app.

Pros

What I really enjoyed with the Everydollar is that it was easy to use if you are not technology savvy. I am technology savvy so this app was simple for me to us, however I do recommend it for many people who are not technology savvy that I have worked with. My sister she used both mint.com and has transitioned to every dollar for this feature.

It is based on Dave Ramseys zero based budgeting, which is an added bonus! It helps you really discover where you are spending your money because you have to manually place in the money you have spent each week/month. It is a great starter budgeting app!

Another advantage is most people start their financial journey knowing Dave Ramsey therefore you can benefit from the app that is built by his team. If you have taken his class at church, school, or attended one of his podcasts you would benefit from the app too. The cool feature they have is the total debt payoff in the paid version. This allows you to see how much debt you’ve accomplished to pay off! For beginning your journey, this is definitely a pro if you need more visual that watching your net worth grow from negative to positive.

Yes, there is a free version of this app too, but the additional features are on the paid version.

Cons

Which brings me to the cons. I have been budgeting cashless for awhile now, so I do not like to save receipts. I have tried this method and cash is very easy for me to spend. Once you break a $100 bill — it is just history to me and I have stuff I do not even know what I bought with it! It is not my cup of tea, however, you may like too! Saving your receipts for an entire week and manually enter them in each week is daunting to me. I like to be able to quickly glance at my spending and be done.

It is a manual process to set up the months budget, which I do not like. I like when my budgets roll over, because my spending does not change that much from month to month other than a few things such as if we go on a tiny home adventure (mostly in the spring – fall).

Everydollar does not have a feature to see your investments, which is a huge downfall. You want get out of debt and build your net worth yet do you do not have the advantage to see this happen in this app. Personally, I am motivated when I see my net worth increase.

Lastly, they recommend the paid version which is $129 yearly so around $10 a month you can pretty much remove most of the disadvantages like connecting your bank account and not having to manually enter in the spending you did each week.

So there you have it folks, I have given you a run down quickly of the pros and cons of both mint.com and Everydollar app! I hope you enjoyed it and learned something on your personal finance journey. Which ever app you choose, this will help you manage your budget with the transition of a cashless lifestyle.

Yearly Bullet Budget Journal

Of course even though we use an app to manage our cashless budget. We still track it ourselves with our yearly bullet budget journal This has helped us build our networth to be 6 figures! You can get the yearly bullet budget journal too to help you!

Like if you already are pretty much cashless.

Like if you use one of these apps.

Pin if this empowers you.

For reading this post, we want to give you a deal for your purchase of our bullet budget journal to change your budget and give you an abundant life!

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