Getting started
By Envelope opens straight into a budget — there's no sign-up, no onboarding wizard, no email to confirm. Enter your monthly income and start giving it jobs.
Enter your income
Type your monthly take-home pay. If you budget with a partner, turn on two-person mode and enter each person's income separately.
Fill your envelopes
Each envelope is a job for your money — rent, groceries, a car payment, retirement. Type an amount, or drag the row's bar to set it as a share of income.
Bring the buffer to zero
The summary card shows your unallocated buffer. When every dollar has a job, it reads $0 — that's a finished envelope budget.
The budget
The Budget tab has three views — Spreadsheet, Pie and Bar — that all read from the same envelopes.
The summary card
At the top, Income and Allocated sit side by side, with a percentage. Below them, a single line reads Buffer remaining when you still have money to assign, or Over-allocated (in warning color) when you've assigned more than you earn.
Envelope rows
Each row carries a category color, a name you can tap to rename, the amount for each person, and a share-of-income bar. Drag the bar's handle to re-allocate that envelope in real time — in two-person mode the new total splits proportionally between the two of you.
Sorting & arranging
Use the sort control next to the envelope count to order by Name, Category or Amount. Choose Manual to drag rows into the exact order you like — your hand-arranged order is remembered.
22/27 active) shows how many envelopes have a non-zero amount. Empty envelopes stay out of the way until you fund them.Charts
Pie
A donut groups your envelopes by category — not by individual envelope — so the picture stays readable. The center shows the share of income and the dollar amount; tap a slice to focus it. If you have an unallocated buffer, it appears as a neutral slice.
Bar
A bar view ranks envelopes from largest to smallest. In two-person mode each envelope shows a Person 1 and Person 2 bar so you can see who covers what at a glance.
Retirement
The Retirement tab answers one question — will the money last? — across three views: Assumptions, Projection and Chart.
Assumptions
Set your investment return, inflation, tax rates, ages, balances and expected Social Security benefit at each claim age. Every rate has both a field and a slider, so you can nudge a number and watch the projection respond.
Projection
Four cards compare claiming Social Security at 62, 65, 67 and 70. Each shows a balance curve and a depletion age — the year the portfolio would run out at your assumptions. Tap a card to drive the year-by-year table below it, which lists the balance every December 31 and the change in cash.
Chart
All four scenarios overlay on one chart. Drag across it to read every scenario's balance at a given age. A summary shows the depletion age per scenario, or ∞ when a plan survives the full horizon.
Categories & theme
Settings is where you tune what the app shows you. Built-in categories — Expenses, Mortgage, Protected Goals, Retirement, Income Taxes, Safe-to-Spend and more — each carry a color used consistently across rows and charts. Add your own categories as needed.
Switch between the light Paper theme and the dark Ink theme, and choose a comfortable or compact density for the lists.
Sync & devices
By Envelope runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Turn on iCloud sync and your budget follows you across every device signed into the same Apple Account — through Apple's private CloudKit database, which we never see.
Sync is optional. With it off, your budget simply lives on the device you entered it on.
Privacy
There are no accounts and no servers. Everything is computed and stored on your device; optional sync uses your own iCloud. For the full policy, see the Privacy page.