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.

You can also give the limit a name and icon of your own - “Fun Money” with a game controller, say. Leave the name blank and it is called WorryFree Budget - or, if you are switching back on, keeps the name you gave it before. To change either later, tap the WorryFree card on the Budgets tab and then the pencil.

Carryover is optional and starts off. Every place you can enable WorryFree - the setup wizard, the Budgets tab and Add Budget - carries 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.

What eats into the limit is your ordinary day-to-day spending, and that same figure is what the carryover is worked out from - so anything left out of one is left out of the other. Tracked bills stay out of it, as do transfers, investment accounts and anything you have deleted. So does every container that is not a monthly one: spending filed against an annual budget, an Out of Pocket budget or a Goal Fund is counted there instead, and a Timed Budget Redirect that sweeps a trip into one takes that spending out of the limit too. None of it reduces this month’s limit, and none of it eats the amount carrying into next month.

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. You can also switch on by tapping +, choosing Budget and picking WorryFree as the Budget Type. 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 Budgets step offers both: Add WorryFree Budget suggests a limit from your income, and adding any budget under Detailed Monthly Budgeting switches you over to individual budgets instead.

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 have a container that is not a monthly budget for it to offer. Annual budgets, Out of Pocket budgets and Goal Funds all count, and all three stay assignable exactly as they were. The field also stays put on a transaction that already has a budget on it, so you can always see and change where an existing one is filed.
• The budget performance sections of Explore’s Budget tab are hidden, since there are no budgets to report on.

A Goal Fund can lend your limit money for a single month. Open the fund under Goal Funds on the Budgets tab, open its Details tab, tap Add Remainder to a Budget and pick WorryFree monthly limit - it sits in the same alphabetical list as your budgets. It is only offered while WorryFree is switched on.

The money is added on top of the amount you set, for the current month only. Your Monthly Spending Limit is never rewritten, so next month opens at your own figure again. The spending card at the top of the Budgets tab says so on its own line - “Includes $150 from a Goal Fund” - and the Details tab behind it breaks the total into Monthly Limit, any Carried Over, and a Credited from row for each fund that contributed.

A credit does not depend on carryover being on. It is money you moved deliberately rather than a leftover, so it arrives either way. To reverse one, open the WorryFree card’s Details tab - not the fund - and tap the Remove button naming that fund, under the buttons. There is one for each fund that contributed. The whole credit comes back, however much the month has cost - a credit to your limit is not clamped by your spending the way a credit to a monthly or annual budget is - but only while the month is still open. If the fund itself has been deleted the credit still closes and your limit drops back to your own figure, with nothing to refund.

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.