Qube Money Review: Digital Cash Envelope Budgeting And Banking

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.

That’s where Qube Money comes into the equation. It’s a banking and budgeting system rolled into one platform. The platform has the power to be one of the most transformative tools for spenders and it's about to move to a nationwide release. Here’s what you need to know about Qube Money.

Qube Money isn’t just a bank account. And it’s not just a budgeting app. It’s both, rolled into one. Users can deposit money into an FDIC-insured Qube Account. Then, you can design a plan to allocate funds among different digital envelopes or "Qubes." You can use some of the pre-generated categories or you can make your own.

The Amazing Debit Card Integration

Once you’ve allocated the money, you have your financial system set 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 the Qube Money app on 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. The website advertises that it will support bill pay with its general release. However, this feature isn’t available right now. Once bill pay is enabled, Qube will become an all-in-one platform which could replace your existing checking account. Plus, it will make it really easy to turn off payments on subscriptions!

As a final note - this system is also great for fraud prevention. We normally don't like people to use their debit cards due to the risk of fraud - if someone gets your card, they can drain your account. With this setup, unless you open a Qube on your app, nothing will get charged!

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.