Setting up a household budget with two HuntingtonMod workspaces

We are two adults, one flat in Amsterdam, one shared bank account and two very different attitudes to money. She is the envelope person; I am the "check the balance on Sunday and pray" person. This has been a running joke for six years and, until March, we managed with a shared Notion page that neither of us really opened.

In March we bought a second-hand inkjet printer for EUR 40 and put it on the kitchen counter. That is where this story really starts.

Why two workspaces, not one

HuntingtonMod workspaces are single-user by design. You could share credentials — we thought about it — but two people signing into the same magic-link inbox is a mess, and the Personal Journal is emphatically not something we wanted to share. She would not have written honestly in a book I could open. I would not have written at all.

So we opened two workspaces, both with the Budget Planner and Subscription Tracker apps, both paid from the same joint IBAN. The SEPA payer name matches on both invoices, which is exactly what HuntingtonMod needs for the household setup (their FAQ mentions this — we did not need to write to them).

The envelope split

On the first of the month, both of us open Budget Planner and split the shared envelopes: rent, groceries, utilities, transport, "eating out with each other", "eating out separately", buffer. The two workspaces then live independently for the rest of the month. We log our own expenses in our own workspace, keep our own habit dotted grid, write our own journal.

At the end of the month, both of us click "Print A5" on the Budget Planner summary. Two cream sheets come out of the kitchen printer, and we clip them together with a paper clip on the fridge. That is the household ledger. It is not a spreadsheet, and I like that.

What we do not do

We do not sync between the two workspaces. There is no shared bucket, no shared magic link, no shared journal. HuntingtonMod does not offer a "family plan" that would merge our data, and I would not want it if it did.

We do not connect the workspaces to our bank. The joint account lives at Bunq; the app there shows the balance. When we want to see who spent what, we look at the paper on the fridge. When we want to know why she spent what she spent, we ask her.

The Sunday morning check-in

Once a week, on Sunday morning, we sit at the kitchen table with two cups of coffee and open our two workspaces side by side. We compare the running totals in Budget Planner. We flag anything surprising. It takes fifteen minutes. Six months in, we have had exactly one argument — about a taxi in December — and even that was over in five minutes because the log made the story obvious.

What surprised us

The Subscription Tracker surfaced three subscriptions we had duplicated between the two of us. That paid for the printer in the first month. The Habit Log — which we did not initially subscribe to — is now on both workspaces because it turned out to be the tool she uses to track "did I actually walk today". Very different reasons per workspace; same tool.

The cost

Two workspaces, three apps each (Budget, Subscription, Habit), EUR 12.70/month each, EUR 25.40 total. The printer paid itself off in two months. Both invoices arrive on the first working day of the month with the same SEPA reference format, we pay them together, and that is the end of admin.

What I would tell another household

Keep the workspaces separate. Buy a small printer. Meet on Sunday morning with coffee. Do not sync. Argue about the taxi and then move on.

HuntingtonMod is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Huntington Bancshares Incorporated, Huntington National Bank, or Huntington Investment Company. Bunq is a trademark of its owner; no affiliation is implied.