In this informal interview, Penny Kidd of Penny Wise Coaching talks with her daughter Mallory, a self‑described power user of the Qube Money budgeting app. Mallory explains how irregular, non‑salaried income made traditional budgeting difficult and how she adopted Qube to gain control over her finances. She details her strategy of splitting direct‑deposit paychecks 50/50 between a checking account (for rent) and Qube, then allocating the Qube portion into numerous “cubes” (individual sinking funds) for essentials (rent, medical, cat care) and lifestyle items (Starbucks, nails, travel). Mallory emphasizes weekly budgeting over the app’s default monthly view, using percentages and weekly targets (e.g., $334/week for adult expenses) and adjusting allocations on the fly. She shares concrete successes, such as saving for a $2,000 bed and funding all travel flights without credit cards, and describes using new Goal Cubes to break large annual insurance premiums into manageable weekly contributions. The conversation also touches on Qube’s upcoming features (bi‑weekly budgeting, family/partner cards) and includes a brief promotional plug with an affiliate link. Overall, Mallory portrays Qube as a flexible, non‑punitive tool that turns budgeting into a personalized, goal‑oriented system, especially suited for people with irregular incomes.
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Hey Wise Guys, it's Penny with Penny Wise Coaching, and I'm here with Mallory. You might think we look a little bit alike. This is my daughter, and I'm here to, uh, ask Mallory some questions about cube money because she is very proficient at it. And you may have heard me talk about it, and it's something we want to share with my Wise Guys about cube money and what's worked for you and kind of some tips and tricks and why you're using So do you want to tell us anything about yourself?
Uh, I am a person in my late 20s. I have always had trouble with budgeting because my income has never been salaried or consistent. I spent many years working as a server, as a nanny, so I never felt like I could budget correctly. Um, and I also did not like the idea of budgeting with cash because my generation doesn't like cash, but we also don't use checkbooks. We just throw our credit cards down. So I really got into Qube when I started paying better attention at what are my lifestyle expenses as opposed to how do I budget the same amount of money every time. It made me more realistic of how much money do I need to make each week to make ends meet, and then I'm not taking on more work than I have to on the flip side. Cool.
So how long have you been using Qube?
I think I've been using Qube solidly for over a year now, I think. I think pretty consistently for over a year.
So tell me a little bit about what you particularly like about it, what's been a struggle, any challenges you've had in kind of acclimating to that and really utilizing it in your life.
I think making the jump to get my paycheck deposited into my Qube was the, like, game changer for using it more often. I started with each new job that I would take on, I would fill out the direct deposit forms as 50 50%. One went into my checking account that like my rent comes out of because I didn't feel like changing that form through my landlord. And then the other 50% goes into Qube. So, you know, half of my monthly income is going towards just rent, which I don't pay that much in rent, but I'm always just setting that aside. And then having Qube be 50% of my income, I don't ever feel like I'm touching like the important money. And then within Qube, I have cubes that are different important things like my emergency fund, my cube for my cat, my cube for medical bills. Like, those are all built in there, but my, my lifestyle budget is within cube, and I never have to worry about not having enough money for rent because I know half of my rent, or half of my income, is going to be more than enough for one, if not two months' rent. I also should preface that I live in New York City, so my numbers are probably a little bit skewed, but percentages is what I like to work off.
I work off of percentages as opposed to numbers a lot of times personally, which I think really all of us have irregular incomes if you think about it. Um, very few people that I coach have like a fixed amount all the time. And anytime you do anything like you sell something or you buy something different, your life is irregular, right? And so talk a little bit, since some people might not even be familiar with what Qube is, about how it works and, um, just kind of the process stuff around Qube.
Um, how I sell Qube is I tell my friends it's like a filing cabinet for your money. So all your money is still in the same place, it's just in different drawers or cubes. So for me, I think I have 24 cubes, which sounds excessive, but I like to micromanage my money. But I am able to have my different cubes support the fun lifestyle because for me, budgeting isn't just about the things that I have to pay for, like my disability insurance and my health insurance and rent, but it's also the things I want to pay for. So I personally have a separate cube for Starbucks because I drink, I drink a lot of Starbucks coffee and I can and admit that, and I can own up to that, but I also budget for it. I get my nails done every 3 weeks, but that is something that is budgeted for, and I am never taking the money I would spend on rent or on my cat to pay for my nails, right? So the same thing could be said if you had a kid. I have a cat, it's the closest I've got. And so I always tell people that my budget works for me, not me working for my budget. So I budget more for dining out because the lifestyle I live does not lead to making a lot of meals at home and grocery shopping a ton, so my grocery budget is much smaller and I just budget more for dining out and I accept that about myself and it's made me feel a lot less guilty about the amount that I eat out because I know it's still coming from my dining out cube. I'm not paying for dining out via my clothing cube or something.
Or rent.
Or rent. Or worrying like, "Oh, did I just eat my next month's rent?" Right, like I hate hearing my friends say, "Oh, I don't know if I can go out to dinner because then I can't pay for rent." And I'm like, then you're not budgeting your money. You're not, you know, and I know for my budget, so you know how I said 50% of it goes into cube. Of that pot that goes into cube, $334 of that pot each week, because I get paid weekly, each week goes towards all of my not fun cubes, my medical bills, because I have, I have to pay for my own health insurance, my own disability. I have to put money aside for my cat. I always put a certain amount for my utilities that I pay for, that kind of thing. So that's not even rent. That's $334 a week to be an adult, which is not fun. Luckily for me and my paycheck, that is usually about a third of my paycheck, maybe a fourth.
And like you said, it could be different in New York than it is in Kansas.
Right, yes.
But But the concepts are the same. Yeah, the numbers are gonna be different.
And in Qube, I have that budget. That $334 is exact because I've budgeted for each Qube. So I don't even have to budget every week because I know that— I mean, I hope I'm making more than $334 a week. And I just know I hit fund 100% of my budget and it goes through in 30 seconds. The minute my paycheck hits on Thursday, that's the first thing I do. And then I get to have the fun of being like, how much money do I want to put in dining out this week? Do I want to put extra money towards my travel cube or towards the gifts cube, which I have for like Christmas and birthdays kind of thing? And then that I just kind of make up on whatever feels good. Some weeks I put $5, some weeks I put $25.
So you're doing what we call sinking funds, um, which is basically setting aside some money for those irregular things such as Christmas or trips. You might notice we're sitting in a beautiful location right now. We happen to be on vacation together in Mexico, and, and I'm proud to say my daughter planned for that and has vacation money. And so, um, it doesn't have to be a crisis. It doesn't have to go on credit cards and then figure it out later.
Well, and it's even fun things of like, I bought myself a very fancy bed this year, which was like the first time I bought a bed since my parents bought me my my first bed a decade ago when I went to college. And so this year I decided I had just started a cube. Could you try it?
Sorry, we're not talking to you.
I had just decided that I was going to save up for a bed, and it didn't matter, you know, some weeks I'd put $5 in the cube and some weeks I'd put $150 if I had a really good week. And eventually I was able to pay for an almost $2,000 bed system all just upfront. There was no financing, there was no putting it on a credit card, Same thing with my travel sinking fund. I have been able to pay for every single flight that I've taken this year upfront.
Have you started to use the new goal cubes?
I have. I have 2 goals right now and neither of them are fun goals, but I see myself in a year finding those goal cubes will save my butt. So my 2 goals are my annual life insurance, uh, what do we call that? Premium. And my annual disability insurance premium. Um, so both of those, I set the goal of when they'll be paid in— I believe one's in November of '23 and then the other is January of '24. And I love it because the minute I put in, I was like, this is how much I will owe on this date, it immediately said, okay, then your budget for the month is this much. And so then when I was making my budget, because my budget goes by weeks, I just said, well, what's 100 divided by 4, for example, is $25, so then I have to budget $25 a week. That's so bite-sized and manageable that it's not intimidating when I have this couple grand worth of payment that I'm gonna have to pay in a year. But I will have all that money and I will not have even looked at it for years.
So talk a little bit about how you have created your budget. You— did you use— because within Qube you can create each line item can have a budget, right?
So instead of creating it a monthly budget, which I think it's says on there monthly, right?
You just treat that—
I just ignore the word monthly. I, I ignore the word month and I just say budget. And I know that I budget weekly. So for some people it might be a biweekly, like your budget that says monthly might be your every other week budget. And so for me, how I, I always work backwards. So I'm like, okay, if I have to put $75 into something once a month then I have to divide it by 4, and that is my budget. Or if you do biweekly paychecks, it would be divided by 2, and that goes into the budget. But the word monthly means nothing to me. I also have found with Cube, I wish there was a way to adjust that, like if it's a monthly versus a weekly budget. And I also ignore— there's some colored lines underneath the cubes that tell you how much you've either funded or how much you've spent for the month. And since I budget weekly, I kind of just ignore those.
Yeah. So it's cool for some people. Sure. And I do think that I have heard CubeMoney say that eventually they'll have options for, you know, funding or budgeting biweekly or something like that. So for now, Mallory's made great use of the tool and then adapted it for herself. And one of the things that I really like about CubeMoney is that you can make changes on the fly when you're at the grocery store. If you don't quite have enough groceries, you can raid your dining cube.
Yeah, you just—
I always tell people don't raid things like clothing if you don't have to, because when you want to buy clothing there's not going to be any money there.
I try and, you know, rob Peter to pay Paul, so I try and make sure they're at least relatable. So like if I'm buying makeup because I love hair and makeup, but maybe my beauty cube doesn't quite have enough but the clothing does, I'm like— or toiletries, so they're similar. I'm not going to take You know, I'm not gonna buy a pair of shoes with my medical cube, you know, but I will pay for my cat's medical bill that I just paid $500 for. I had like $300 in her cube, so I took another $200 from— I either did medical or emergency, I don't remember, but I had it enough that I was like, okay, I guess peace of mind for my 4-year-old cat is $500.
So overall, to just kind of wrap up that your experience with Qube has been— sounds like more freeing and not punitive. A lot of people think budgeting is going to be like, you can never spend money.
Well, I remember I texted my mom when I moved apartments in March. So when you move in New York, you have to sell not only an arm and a leg but your firstborn. And it's very difficult and it can be very expensive very quickly. And I remember texting her when I was like sending all my banking information to my broker and whatnot, and I said, I have $10,000 to my name, which still is a big deal. And it was because of Qube, because I felt like I was actually spending less by being more cognizant of what I had to spend. And I'm still working, and I still see my, like, general savings and protection of money goes quicker in Qube than it even does in my rent checking.
I appreciate that. And I think that our, our conversation about this hopefully gives you a sense of what CubeMoney is. It's a fairly new company and we've watched it grow for 4 or 5 years now. And really, the potential is really there. So we hope that you'll give it a shot, take a look at it. I'll put my affiliate link here somewhere in the, in the information, and I would love for you to give it a try. They do have a free option right now that could be changing over time, and then you can also purchase an unlimited Qube where you can have partners who, who share the same account with you. They have their card, you have yours, and then they have family versions now that are fairly recently out, and that's a new cool option as well. So your kids could even have their own little Qube cards. So thanks for sharing your experience. I know that you, you're like a power user to me.
And I use it. It's the only thing I use now when I spend money.
