Jenna Fante ran her family's budget the same way for ten years. In December 2024 she moved the family to Italy, and the budget lasted about six months more. I moved my own family to Spain three years ago and hit the same wall. Jenna uses Borderless Budget now, and I asked her to tell me the whole story: what the move did to the budget, what it cost, and what she would tell a family about to make the same move.
Ten years of knowing where the money went
Jenna started budgeting around 2015, after taking Dave Ramsey's course and picking up EveryDollar. Before that she did not budget at all.
"No matter how little money we were making at times, when we were first married and really young, or how much money we had grown to make, I still seemed to not have any money."
Zero-based budgeting gave every dollar a job before the month started, and what she valued was not the arithmetic but what it did to the background noise. "It gives you more freedom, because then you know that everything is accounted for, and so it reduces the stress and anxiety." She got her family out of debt and into savings, and she stayed with it for a decade.
The move did not break it. The paycheck did.
They arrived in Italy in December 2024, and for six months the system held, because her income was still arriving in dollars. She could do the conversion in her head and keep the budget in the currency it was built for. "EveryDollar worked for me when I was still getting US currency, because then I could just do some math and change the numbers in the budget according to what I was really spending in euros."
Then her income switched to euros, landing in an Italian account. Nothing about the math got harder. The labor did.
"I was going through and inputting every single transaction, and that was really time consuming. Now I'm spending my work time, or my family time, allocating transactions in my budget."
Then she said the thing that I think is the real case for automating a budget:
"If I have to allocate every transaction to a category, I won't do it. It's too time consuming."
That is the wall I hit when we moved to Spain. I did not want to hand-enter anything either, and I could not find a tool that would sync accounts across two countries and do the categorizing for me.
A year without a system
She went looking for a replacement and did not find one. She tried Fast Budget. She tried YNAB and did not get past the free trial.
Here is what the gap actually cost, in her words:
"If I can't use a budgeting app, then I have more anxiety about the state of my finances. And then I go back into an old pattern, or an old way of being... I'm just going to spend my money and hope it's there. Which is a terrible way to live."
What two countries actually looks like
Her money now runs in two places at once.
She still uses US credit cards, choosing by which one will not charge her extra fees on a purchase in the other currency. Conversions go through Wise. Her business is a sole proprietorship with its own Italian bank account: income lands there, the quarterly tax prepayments sit there waiting for the Italian government, and she moves the rest across to the personal account. Her field turns out to have its own tax code in Italy, which not every accountant knows; she is on her third commercialista.
On exchange rates she has landed somewhere calmer than she started. Big transfers still get planned. The daily noise she has stopped watching. "Now, because my transfers are smaller, I just decide not to worry about it as much, because I don't have any control over it anyway."
What she would tell a family about to do this
Keep a large buffer in savings before you go. Her number is around $20,000. Not for the move itself, but for the constant administrative drip that nobody warns you about: lawyers, fees, and in the first year, traffic camera tickets.
"Have 20,000 in a savings account, and then you won't feel so terrible when you've got 1,500 in tickets that you have to pay. We just say they're stupid tax, because you just don't know what you don't know until you're there."
What she still wants
I asked what she wishes any budgeting app would do. She did not hesitate: sinking funds. Named jars for money that is already spoken for but not yet spent. Car insurance due once a year, a medical buffer, the gas bill that arrives quarterly instead of monthly.
"I don't want to see my savings sitting in my checking account, because I'm trying to safeguard myself against spending it. If I look in there, I'm like, oh, there's an extra thousand dollars in here."
The closest thing she has found is Wise, which lets you split a balance into named jars, and she is starting to move savings there. Once a Wise account is connected to Borderless Budget the jars show up alongside everything else, and the money moved into them counts as a transfer rather than as spending, so the budget stays honest about what actually left the household.
So far
Her favorite thing in Borderless Budget so far is the weekly reports that work by "showing me where I'm spending less and where I'm spending more, or where I'm on track. That's something EveryDollar didn't do."
Speaking with Jenna reinforced that people whose money lives in two countries are dealing with the same set of challenges. And there aren't many good tools to help them. Jenna's feedback will go directly into what's built in Borderless, and hopefully alleviate the challenges for everyone else out there facing the same challenges.
Thank you, Jenna.
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