My favorite budgeting app is YNAB, which has an amazing desktop and iPhone version.

The main idea behind YNAB is moving beyond paycheck-to-paycheck living, so they suggest spending last month’s salary this month so you can escape the rat race.

This is enabled by subtracting any amount you went over by in any budgeted categories from your total salary for the next month.

So, if you spend $50 more than you budgeted last month, this month you have $50 less dollars overall to budget. Pretty simple.

However, our budget is fairly stable, and we like to let certain categories go slightly into the negative, especially categories like gifts. Some months we have don’t have any birthday or wedding gifts to buy and other months we make it rain.

There’s an option to have each category carry over to function as a sinking fund instead of improperly budgeted categories affecting  your whole budget. We prefer each category to carry its own balance.

For example, in June we were $9.74 over on our gifts budget. So, instead of that $9 and some change coming out of our total money available to budget for July, we have it carry over in the specific gifts category and carry a slight negative balance in that specific digital envelope.

It’s simple to enable. On the desktop version of YNAB, just go to Budget and then click on the number under the balance column. Then, click the button next to “Subtract it from next month’s category balance” instead of the “Subtract it from next month’s Available to Budget.”

You’ll have to enable this for every category you want to carry over, and you’ll know it’s carrying over if there is a little red arrow next to the total.