Envelope budgeting is a great technique if you don’t know how you are spending your money. Like the name suggests it is a simple way to exactly define how much you need or have for a variety of categories in your monthly spending using envelopes to store the money. The theory is: grab your salary, get a bunch of envelopes and write down on each one the things you need to pay for: groceries, telephone, internet, health care and so on. After you created your “must-have” envelopes and if you still have any money left, create some envelopes to enjoy your life too, like: dining out, movies or whatever you like. With that you will know exactly how much you need in your monthly expenses, and you will know for sure how much you have to spend for the “non-mandatory” needs we all have. You can use the envelopes itself, but there is also a lot of financial software out there that uses this budgeting method like Mnvelopes or iBank for Mac. Check out more about envelope budgeting on Dave Ramsey website where you can a lot of other debt advices.