WorryFree

Instead of building a budget for groceries, dining, shopping and entertainment separately, you get one limit for the lot. You glance at one number, see the room you have left for the period, and get on with your day.

There is no juggling of envelopes, no rebalancing after you overspend in one bucket, and no deciding which budget a coffee should hit. New accounts start here.

The limit is a number you set and control. It does not silently recalculate when a bill changes or your income moves.

To help you start, the enable dialog pre-fills a suggested 30% of your expected income and shows your figure as a percentage of income as you type, so you can see how generous or tight it is. Type over the suggestion with whatever fits. Whatever you enter stands until you edit it again.

Carryover is optional and starts off. Both places you can enable WorryFree - the setup wizard and the + menu - carry a Rollover unused amount into next month toggle, unticked by default.

Switch it on and any unused portion of your limit carries into next month on top of that month’s amount. Leave it off and each month starts fresh. Only unused funds carry: carryover clamps at zero, so a quiet month buys you room later but a heavy month never pushes a negative into the next one.

You are a good candidate if:

• Per-category budgeting felt like a daily chore you kept skipping.
• Your bills and savings are reasonably stable month to month.
• You care more about the bottom line than which category absorbed which charge.
• You want something that survives a busy month untouched.

Per-category budgets are still the better tool if you are actively trying to cut one specific area of spending, because that is exactly the visibility a single limit gives up.

Switch either way at any time, from the Budgets tab or the + menu. Nothing is lost in either direction:

1. Switching to WorryFree preserves your existing budgets but stops enforcing them. They stay in your history.
2. Switching back reactivates them exactly as they were.
3. If you started on WorryFree and never made any category budgets, switching over gives you an empty Budgets tab ready for your first one.

During initial setup, the Spending Plan step suggests a limit and lets you switch right there: open Prefer Detailed Monthly Budgeting? and untick WorryFree, and the usual preset categories are ready to edit.

Bills and savings goals carry across both modes unchanged. There is nothing to re-enter when you flip.

Because one limit replaces per-category budgets, a few things adjust while WorryFree is on:

• The Monthly Budgets section and its dashboard widget are hidden, and return when you switch off.
• Splitting a transaction is not offered. Splits divide a charge across several budgets, which does not apply to a single limit. See Splitting Transactions.
• The Budget field disappears from the transaction form, unless you keep annual or out-of-pocket budgets for it to offer.
• The budget performance sections of Reports are hidden, since there are no budgets to report on.

Annual budgets stay available in WorryFree, and they pair with it well. Travel, holidays, gifts and car maintenance get a yearly target tracked across the full year while your WorryFree limit handles the day to day. See Annual Budgets.

WorryFree gets better when the bills and income side runs itself. Connect your accounts through synced accounts so transactions flow in, and let recurring detection surface new subscriptions as they appear. With those two on, your discretionary spending is tracked against your limit without you entering anything.