Very similar to Ramsey's advice (as I understand it), I use and love YNAB, which encourages zero-balance budgeting and a month of "buffer", which boils down to paying this month's income into next month's budget. There are no religious overtones as far as I can tell. It is designed for people working their way out from under debt (especially from credit cards), but it's very useful outside that use case as well!
YNAB is nice for targeting savings goals as well, not just to get out of debt. Longterm goals like buying a house or car? Set a category for it and every month allocate $xxx to it. Have an upcoming trip? Create a category for it (Wedding in GA) with subcategories like hotel, clothing (purchasing, renting, cleaning, altering, it's a catchall), fuel, gift, misc. Let's say (real example) I have a 4 hour drive, in my car that's 1 tank of gas for there and back, about $40, call it $50 to be safe. I allocate $5/month to the fuel category for this trip. Now when I take the trip in November I don't have to find $50, it's already been "spent" in my allocations. And at the end of the trip I can take my savings (if any) and push it into other categories (a general trip fund, an extra dinner out that month, whatever). Then you just hide the "Wedding in GA" category and the spending is still there and tracked for historical purposes, but you don't see it again.
Actually, its medium-to-long-term savings goal functionality is the only thing I don't like about YNAB. It's good for the sort of "save $5/month for something that will eventually cost an indeterminate amount of money" use case, but not as good for the "I want to have exactly $X saved at exactly Y date, a single time", like for a car or house down payment. To do that, you have to manually figure out X / (Y - NOW) / 12, and then make sure to carry it forward each month, and cancel it after the time comes.
Hardly a death knell, but I think it could do better to encourage closed-ended known-amount savings than it does!
It could be easier, but it is an opinionated piece of software. Their main focus is budgeting one month out (this and next month). However, for calculating the amount to allocate each month for a longterm goal they do have a convenient tool. Once you enter a value (say $4800 for easy math), type '/12<enter>' and it'll replace $4800 with $400. Then once you have income to start budgeting next month you can copy that over.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, it isn't hard to do at all, and I think it reflects their focus on people living month-to-month, that just isn't me. I love that it is opinionated and that its opinions are so universally good, it's just one style of saving I wish were better encouraged by the interface.
