Qube Money Review: Digital Cash Envelope Budgeting And Banking (2024)

The envelope system is a budgeting method where you cash out all (or most) of your income and separate the money into different budget categories. Some money goes towards long-term envelopes (like vacations), and other money goes into fast-spending envelopes (like childcare, groceries and restaurants).

The envelope system is super-effective for helping people to understand trade-offs when it comes to spending. If you don’t have money set aside for something, you either have to do without or borrow from another category. Is that new video game worth a pantry challenge to you? Or do you want to delay a trip because you’re choosing Chipotle for lunch again? That’s the kind of decisions you face when using cash envelopes.

But the problem with cash envelopes is that they are cumbersome to use. Sure they’re effective, but who wants to get a few thousand dollars from the bank every month. Not to mention a lot of bills can only be paid online.

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Once you’ve allocated the money, you have your financial systemset up. But you can’t run up transactions with your new Qube debit card. As a default, the Qube card has a $0 balance. If you try to swipe your card without allocating a transaction to an envelope/Qube, the transaction will be denied.

Whenever you want to spend money, you open theQube Money appon your phone. Select the Qube where you’ll spend the money and you’ll immediately have the funds from the Qube available to spend. As soon as the transaction goes through, the transaction is recorded in Qube and any remaining funds are transferred back into the Qube. The balance on the debit card is reverted to $0.

Qube works for both online and in-person transactions. Support for bill pay was released in July 2021. And a new Bills Home Screen launched a month later in August 2021.

Qube Money has a free tier which limits users to 10 cash envelopes and a single debit card. The free tier doesn’t offer budget automation so you’ll need to reset your Qubes each pay period. This may be adequate for a typical person who doesn’t share finances with a partner.

However, people who share finances may want to upgrade to the Premium plan which offers:

I used an early iteration of Qube Money back in 2017 (the app was called ProActive back then). While it was a bit clunky at the time, it did deliver on the promise that it would force me to face my spending decisions.

Whether Qube will save you money will depend a lot on your personality. Personally, it took me about four years of regularly using some form of the cash envelope system to get my spending under control. Now that I have adjusted my spending, I rarely feel the need to go back on an “all-cash diet.” However, I often recommend them for others because the savings can be tremendous.