This is the system my grandmother ran with envelopes, brought up to date. Bills money goes in one place, everything else goes in another, and the balance of the second one is your budget. No categories, no app, no guilt chart.

Envelopes are underrated. The reason they work is that they move the decision to payday, when you're calm, instead of the checkout, when you're not.

Counterpoint: I like my budget app. It caught a subscription I'd forgotten about that was costing me more a year than my phone. Two accounts wouldn't have shown me that.

Fair, though a once-a-year scroll through your statements would have too. The app is doing a job you could do in an afternoon.

In fairness, I was never going to spend that afternoon. That's sort of the point of the app.

The hard part for a lot of people in their twenties isn't the method, it's having enough left after rent for the second account to mean anything. I don't say that to dismiss the post, which is good. The method just assumes there's a gap to manage.

I think that's exactly who First Paycheck is for, though. Two accounts won't make anyone richer. What they change is when you find out: on payday, when you can still adjust, instead of on the 24th.

Banks that let you open sub-accounts or 'pots' inside one account make this almost frictionless. You get the separation without opening an account somewhere else and going through another round of identity checks.

Pedant hat on: a pot isn't always a separate account in the legal sense, which can matter for deposit insurance and for what happens if the provider fails. At most balances, for most people, it won't matter. Worth knowing anyway.

Two accounts plus one rule: any transfer back out of the bills account needs a reason you'd be willing to say out loud. I've broken it twice in three years.