Danna has always been organized about her finances. The problem was that her financial system told her what she had spent in the past, rather than helping her prepare for the future.

“Each week I religiously entered into Microsoft Money every receipt or check written,” she explains. “I would dread doing it because it was such a tedious job. The receipts would pile up and it would take me a couple hours. But after I entered them, I realized I was already over budget. It was too late. I could always tell you after the fact where we had spent the money – but we were never getting ahead.”

While her husband made a good salary, the majority of his income came from bonuses. They used those funds to cover the extra spending on their credit cards, vacations and savings for retirement and college for their four children. Then the business went through a transition period, and the bonuses evaporated for three years.

“I didn’t realize how much I depended on the bonuses for every day living,” says Danna. “All of the sudden he was saying we had to live within (his salary). Slowly our savings eroded away. We were stressed all the time and felt we shouldn’t spend any money. That was about the time I found out about Mvelopes.”

Their oldest went off to a private university during this time. “We had a year’s tuition saved up, and we were not worried about coming up with the rest; we thought, ‘no problem, we’ll get another bonus,’” Danna recalls. “Suddenly he was saying there would be no bonuses for a while, and we had to find a way to keep paying for college.”

Within the first year of using the Mvelopes system, the family was able to live within their means and set aside a few hundred a month for college. They took out a no-interest loan from a foundation and a Stafford loan to help their son graduate. Danna even managed do a few home decorating projects during the dry spell.

“Now when I make spending decisions I ask myself, ‘Do I want this bad enough to take it out of another envelope?’” Danna explains. “One time I wanted to put new windows in the house. I cut back on drycleaning, entertainment and everywhere I could find a little extra money to put in the decorating envelope. After six months I had $800 saved and was able to do my windows and not feel guilty.”

Fortunately, the business rebounded. They used their first bonus to pay off their oldest son’s student loans, set college money aside for their next child, and pay off the mortgage. They continue to set aside the monthly mortgage payment, directing it toward college savings. “Without Mvelopes, we wouldn’t have been able to pay off our house, because we would have been so far in debt from living beyond his salary,” Danna says.

Another plus -- instead of spending hours each week entering expenditures into Microsoft Money, Danna spends about five minutes a few times a week on Mvelopes. “Once you get it set up, it’s so fast,” she says. She’s no longer afraid to charge everything to her Discover Card, because she knows she has the money to pay it off in full, and enjoy the cash-back bonus.

Danna now spreads the word about Mvelopes to whoever will listen. “It’s my standard wedding gift for my nieces and nephews and they all love it,” she says. “The days of living beyond your means are really over. When I teach family members about Mvelopes and they get set up, what may at first seem so hopeless to them -- because maybe they have debts -- now seems manageable. I bought Mvelopes for my son and his wife, and I said, ‘if you use it and be faithful about it, you’ll never argue about money.’”