Qube Money: Envelope Budgeting

First and foremost I am aware that Qube is in beta and making changes. I do not expect it to be fully polished or bug free. My wife and I have loved using Qube to budget and save money. I know the Qube team has had to make a lot of adjustments to the budgeting system due to changes in banking partnership. We have been eagerly waiting for Qube to be back up since the service had to pause and make changes. Now that it is back and in beta we have been testing it out. Originally, your money would be stored in Qube, you would allocate it between envelopes (Qubes), and you would select one before it would let you spend on your Qube card. It was intuitive, easy to use, and effective for budgeting. Now without a banking partner Qube is unable to have money stored in the app. You report transactions manually based on your spending between debit and credit cards. These new steps and changes have been a point of frustration for us. I have been trying to take time learning the new system. I am fairly tech literate but have been struggling to budget with this the same way I used to. As a customer, it’s hard to not compare the new system to how it used to work. It has been a little disappointing because the way it used to work was the perfect budgeting solution for us. Are these just growing pains? We will find out. The team has proven they can make something great, so I feel it is worth keeping up with the progress of this beta.

I will update if it turns out to just be lack of knowledge with the app. That being said, I spent about 5 hours yesterday trying to figure things out. First issue is preplanning for a future month/period. Theres no way to do this on mobile, and it’s honestly annoying. Not everyone has access to a computer, which is what I had to do my preplanning. With May almost finished, I’m not going to start with May, that’s just silly since I’m officially broke until the 1st. I’m starting in June. Well, there have been issues even on the computer as well. For example, all of the default categories. Not everyone had Amazon or Hulu or Spotify, and yes, you can edit them, but even editing all the defaults there were still extras cluttering things up. Archive them, right? Wrong. Tried to archive them and there was an error saying they don’t exist. I’m going to keep it for at least the 15 day free trial, but I will not be renewing until I know how it works or determine it’s too much work to deal with the bugs. I have a computer, but I don’t have WiFi and have to use my phone hotspot. There’s only so much of that with my plan, so I’d rather not pay for an app, pay for extra hotspot…just to do everything on the computer. I should be able to do most, if not all, from my phone. Compared to EveryDollar, there are a few things computer/browser exclusive, but it’s small things like renaming groups or deleting extra groups. Everything else is accessible on both the app and the browser, just those two things that are browser exclusive. Like I said, I’m gonna give it til the end of the 15 day trial, but I, so far, hate this app due to all the bugs. Also, I’m only able to connect the one account. Like I have 2 checking with the same bank, and 2 savings. I was only able to connect one checking, and an error showed up saying my credentials were correct but my account was ineligible. How is one checking at a bank eligible but the other checking isn’t? In addition, I already have money towards my savings goals, from previous months, but I’m not able to add that current balance. It makes me start at $0 saved, which is annoying.

Current: BEWARE!!! I still have yet to see resolve from my case from the shut down of this app and the loss of their banking partner. In the shutdown we had several thousand dollars in our account and when closing out Qube said we had negative transactions and basically stole our money. I’m posting this here because others should be careful when engaging and maybe this will actually get someone to respond to me as a human not an AI Former: We’ve been using Qube and are former Simple / One Finance Users and use Qube in conjunction with Every Dollar and Dave Ramsey’s approach to budgeting. This app does everything we need it to do and we can’t stop talking about it and sharing this with others. It’s made budgeting more enjoyable and effective!