As a mother of two small boys—a 3-year old and a 7-month old—I need a simple, low-maintenance way to manage our family's finances. I've always liked the concept of the envelopes budgeting method, but I hated carrying around multiple envelopes filled with cash and coins, and was confused about how to handle our many non-cash purchases. When I'd remember something we needed at the store, I couldn't buy it because I'd left my envelope at home.

Mvelopes changed my life with its simplicity. Instead of avoiding debit purchases, my husband and I now prefer them; Mvelopes allows us to see exactly where our money is going by listing the details of every transaction. It has solved the money "power struggle" in our home—whether at home, at work, or on a mobile device, we both have instant access to the most current information about out finances, giving each of us decision-making power. We always know exactly where we stand financially without having to spend the weekend balancing the checkbook. And all this peace of mind takes just five minutes a day of maintenance online. For a creative, "big-picture" thinker like me, this is invaluable.

My husband recently went back to school full time, and even on a reduced budget, we will always make room for the small Mvelopes fee, because it provides the simple, easy-to-maintain plan we need to feel secure about our money day by day.

I am a numbers person by nature and I have always been interested in cash flow and keeping up with expenses. In fact, I am so interested I even do it for a living as a Certified Financial Planner™ practitioner! I have access to many professional programs through my job and in the past I have resorted to elaborate spreadsheets of my own when the programs could not suit my needs. I was also an addict of Quicken.

As you may imagine, this took up hours upon hours of my time and used up the majority of my weekends and I still wasn't sure I was getting the "real" answers about my spending.

In comes Mvelopes. I learned about Mvelopes from an article another financial planner had written. I decided to give it a shot. I am happy to report that over two years later I am still using Mvelopes and am thrilled with the utility and the reassurance that my numbers are in fact "real."

In the past two years we have had some major life changes including the sale of our condo and purchase of our first home, as well as paying off our student loans and car loan. There is no doubt in my mind that using Mvelopes helped facilitate all of these changes.

I am more confident than ever in our spending plan and I feel a freedom not only in knowing that our money is properly accounted for, but that I get my weekends back! Mvelopes gives me real answers in just a few minutes a day. I recommend it to all of my clients and have seen the difference it has made in their lives and "bottom lines" as well!

We are now expecting our first child and we are already using Mvelopes to save for baby expenses, too!

I'd like to start first by saying thank you for this budgeting system! I have tried many budgeting systems in the past and never succeeded, but this is the first one that really worked for me. I think the best part for me is after years of trying to get my husband to catch the vision about living on a budget, he finally got it when I showed him our budget on Mvelopes.

Since using this budgeting system, for the first time in many years I can honestly say I know where my money is going and how much I have spent in any of the categories I have set up. It has also given us a vision for getting out of debt. Things will be tight but we know that the end result is going to be awesome. So once again I thank you soooo much for Mvelopes.

Thanks so much for Mvelopes! We always spent quite a bit of time in Quicken, but could never really figure out the budget. We were leading a small group for Crown Ministry and came upon Mvelopes, which simplified budgeting. In fact, the entire process has actually become "fun." We love the snapshots that we can look at together weekly and praise God for growth and see areas to work on. We also love that we do not need to carry cash around, yet every penny can easily be accounted for even before it's spent. Thanks for the product, it's definitely encouraging and actually saves money!

Last week, I decided Mvelopes wasn't for me anymore and I was going to switch to Microsoft Money. As you will see below, using Mvelopes has treated us well, but I felt like another program could perhaps offer more.

So I went to Best Buy and bought Microsoft Money Deluxe 2006. I was happy to see all the features I had missed in Mvelopes: integrated debt reduction planner, cash flow forecast and bill integration.

I was starting to pat myself on the back for my decision. Then, a couple of things happened. As I started to go through the budget, I saw how Microsoft Money (and Quicken for that matter) is completely ineffective and inflexible when it comes to budgeting. The "bill integration" feature I loved so much started taking over my budget. There was no functionality for amassing any amount of money over a period of months for anything.

Everything started getting more complicated. I started waking up in the middle of the night worrying about it. The other thing that struck me is how much my finances have changed since I started using Mvelopes. For full disclosure, here's a summary of my financial picture from April 2003, four months after I started using Mvelopes:

Total Credit Card Debt: $28,188.29
Total Student Loan Debt: $38,675.36
Total Car Loan Debt: $14,595.18 Total
Unsecured Debt: $82,007.90

Well, over the past three years, dealing with two Mvelopes upgrades, dealing with my own financial issues like putting my wife through graduate school (paying cash), buying a new house and doing thousands of dollars of remodeling (paying cash), and dealing with three career changes in the family, here is my current financial picture, as of March 4, 2006:

Total Credit Card Debt: $0
Total Student Loan Debt: $36,702.33
Total Car Loan Debt: $0
Total Unsecured Debt, as of March 4: $36,702.33

This is a pretty compelling use case for what simple budgeting can do for ones finances. I learned long ago that it doesn't matter that you know all the details about your money (the stuff that Money and Quicken spend a lot of time on). That's ultimately not important. Your financial picture is your financial picture. What is vastly more important is what you do with the money that comes in every month. And, I'm telling you as a software engineer who has expertise in the business, Mvelopes completely dominates the competition when it comes to helping you manage your cash flow month to month. Period.

Now, with $36K of student loans within range, what software am I going to use to get me to $0? I'm going to use Mvelopes. I could go on and on about different strategies we used with the program to make that happen. I suppose the story isn't finished yet. Hopefully, in two years from now, I'll be able to write: "Difference between Mvelopes and Microsoft Money: $82,000."

Thanks for reading.