# Jade Tree User's Guide
Welcome to Jade Tree, a personal budgeting tool designed to put your money to work and show you where every dollar goes. Jade Tree is a self-hosted service which gives you total control of your data. Follow the instructions in the Installation Guide to install and set up your Jade Tree server with Docker, or jump right in to the Getting Started section.
# Quick Start
Download and install Docker (opens new window), Docker Compose (opens new window) and Git (opens new window). Run the following commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/asymworks/jadetree-backend.git jadetree
$ docker-compose -f jadetree/docker-compose.yml up -d
$ docker-compose -f jadetree/docker-compose.yml exec backend /home/jadetree/docker-entry.sh db init
$ docker-compose -f jadetree/docker-compose.yml restart backend
Navigate to http://localhost:8733 (opens new window) to start setting up your Jade Tree server.
# Budgeting Philosophy
Jade Tree uses a form of Envelope Budgeting (opens new window) where all income (meaning any money received by a person from a paycheck, gift, or picked up off the street) gets put into a virtual envelope that is dedicated for some type of expense. So you might have an envelope for your rent payment, one for utilities, one for groceries, and so on. Even savings goals and "fun" money get envelopes, as do any debts you have and are trying to pay off. In Jade Tree we call these envelopes "Categories" and will call them that from here on out.
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Each month, every dollar of income is put into a category (envelope), and then every time you spend money, that amount gets assigned to a category (taken out of the envelope). If a category runs out of money (spending more than was budgeted), money has to be taken from a different category to make up the balance. If an envelope has money left over at the end of the month, it is left there for the next month's spending.
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When you first start budgeting, it's normal for money to be moved around between categories a lot, as you get a feel for how much money you need for each in a given month. This is a great exercise to learn where your money is really going versus where you think it goes (and why it's gone so much sooner than you expect).
Each time you receive income in Jade Tree, you can choose to make it available to put into categories in the current month (same month you received the money) or the next month. When you first start out budgeting, especially if you have a lot of debt to pay off, you might have to use almost all of it in the current month's categories to keep up with your spending and debts, and your categories might be nearly empty at the end of every month.
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As you learn where your money goes, you can start leaving a bit extra in each category at the end of every month, either budgeting more or spending less (or both!), and eventually you will find you have enough to cover a whole extra month's worth of spending. At that point you can start putting your income into next month's categories, and be confident that you can cover all your expenses for the current month without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
If you are lucky enough to have enough savings to cover a full month's worth of expenses when you start, that is great! Just start putting all your income into next-month categories and start tracking spending.
And really, that's all there is to it. Learning where your money goes and giving every dollar a job by putting it in a category give you the tools you need to take control of your budget. There are a lot of internet resources about the envelope budgeting method and the different philosophies, which we encourage you to research and read to find out what method works best for you, whether or not it's Jade Tree.
Now go Set Up your own Jade Tree server and get started budgeting!